#i worry about printing costs and whatever so having someone else do that + marketing sounds like a good deal

[tuesziday]

I got a question answered about Iron Circus!

[thisissirius]

the most important mark to leave [AO3 Link] eddie/buck, chris. birthdays, marriage proposals, fluff and family.

“This is gross,” Eddie mutters.

If Abuela were to ever see the inside of his fridge; Eddie doesn’t wanna think about it. He moves some of the tupperware out of the way, wrinkling his nose. He doesn’t know how long some have these have been here. He gets a steady collection of pre-cooked food thanks to both Abuela and Buck, who are determined that Chris never eats anything Eddie cooks.

Which, fair, when Eddie’s not taking a dent to his pride, he can admit that living off of canned and boxed food isn’t the healthiest.

“Dad?”

Eddie looks back over his shoulder. Chris is at the table, doing his spelling for the next day. He’s been going through a nope phase with anything writing related, so Eddie’s pleased to see it. “Yeah, buddy?”

Chris shifts on his seat. “Is Buck coming over next Saturday?”

“Uh,” Eddie says, trying to think what’s happening next Saturday. He’s not working and he’s almost positive Buck’s been making noise about the aquarium. “I think so. We’ll have to ask.”

“No!” Chris looks contrite right after his shout.

“No?” Eddie raises his eyebrows and drops some of the tuppers into the trash. They’re beyond saving and it’s easier to buy new ones than expose himself—and Chris—to whatever’s inside. “Chris—”

“I meant,” Chris starts, “we have to ask him because he’s gotta come to his birthday party.”

Eddie’s not forgotten it’s Buck’s birthday; he’s already got Buck’s gift planned out, he just needs the right time. They haven’t been able to go on a proper date in weeks, but that’s never bothered them. Buck likes the domesticity that comes from being a father—and Eddie’s always going to be grateful Buck loves his son like he’s his own—and Eddie loves being under his own roof and not having a ton of people stare at him when he's inevitably awkward. “I don’t know if Buck wants that.”

Chris frowns, then puts down his pen. He meets Eddie’s eyes unflinchingly. “Dad, Buck’s not gonna say he wants a party. He doesn’t think you want a fuss.”

Eddie is, apparently, a failure of a partner. “Buck—”

“He told Abuela,” Chris says, matter-of-factly. “I wasn’t meant to hear but they thought I was sleeping. He knows you don’t like big celebration things unless they’re inside but he wants a backyard party. He wants fireworks because he thinks they’re cool and he never got them when he was as old as me. He also never got cake like I do. That’s really sad, Dad.”

It takes Eddie a moment to get his feelings under control. When he does, he closes the fridge door and sits across from Chris. He doesn’t know any of this about Buck but he’s not surprised; they don’t talk about their pasts because there’s so much there they don’t want to address. Their present and their future have always been their focus because they’re more important. Eddie thinks maybe it’s a mistake.

“Buck wants to be happy.” Chris stares down at his homework, still frowning. “He doesn’t want you to be upset with what he wants.”

There’s clearly things both he and Buck have to talk about, but Eddie’s overcome with emotion; he wants Buck to have whatever he needs, to enjoy his birthday instead of worrying about what everyone else thinks. “Well,” he says, leaning across the table and sharing a grin with his son. “I guess we should plan Buck’s birthday, shouldn’t we?”

Chris cheers and then looks down at his homework. “Does this mean I don’t have to do my spelling?”

“Nice try, buddy,” Eddie says with a laugh. “Unless you want me to call Buck and tell him you’re not doing your homework.”

“Alright,” Chris says. “I’ll finish it.”

“It should be superheroes,” Chris says.

Eddie pulls into the mall parking lot, cursing when there isn’t an available spot. Where are all the people coming from? It’s his only day off and he doesn’t wanna spend it driving around a parking lot. There’s a woman in a minivan almost on his tail and he rolls his eyes. Tapping his fingers on the wheel, he curses inwardly. “Why’s that?”

Chris sighs dramatically and Eddie snorts. He’s definitely been spending too much time with Buck. “Because Buck loves superheroes, Dad. That’s why he wants a replicon Steve shield for his birthday.”

“Replica,” Eddie corrects gently, grinning. A spot opens up and he manages to swipe it before the woman in the minivan. She looks harassed, four kids in the back, and Eddie gets a flashback to Chris’ sleepover. He doesn’t envy her one bit. “It’s a good job we managed to get it then, isn’t it?”

Chris meets his eyes in the mirror. “We’re the best.”

“Yes, we are,” Eddie says, shutting off the truck. “How about we grab Buck a cake?”

Navigating the market is an exercise in frustration at the best of times, but even more so when Chris is demanding everything be perfect. Not that Eddie’s complaining; after the couple of years Buck’s had, he deserves to be lavished with affection and Chris is nothing if not the best source of that where Buck’s concerned.

They scan the row of cakes and Eddie’s not finding any good enough. Now that he knows Buck’s never had one, he wants it to be perfect. Chris also comments on most of them; he likes some of the characters he and Buck watch on television. (Eddie doesn’t have the heart to tell him Buck watches the cartoons because Chris likes them). He stops at the generic ones; round chocolate cakes, red velvet, the occasional long and thin caterpillar cakes.

“I like that one,” Chris says. He points to a heart-shaped cake on one of the lower shelves.

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Why that one?”

Chris tips his head back, looking up at Eddie with a grin. “Buck’s got a big heart, Dad, and he gives it to all of us all the time. Now we get to show him we know.”

One day Eddie’s gonna stop being surprised by his son’s goodness. Though it’s less surprise and more awe that he’s responsible for such a beautiful human being. “I love you so much, kid.”

“I love you too, Dad,” Chris says and Eddie’s not sure if that’s a roll of his eyes. Honestly, Buck time is being rationed. “So are we getting the cake?”

Eddie agrees easily and puts the cake in the cart. It’s probably cheaper to make his own, but he’s never tried baking before and he knows the instant he turns on the oven to try, Buck’ll appear somehow to yell him out of the kitchen. “I think that’s it, bud.”

“No.” Chris unfolds the piece of paper he’s been clutching the entire trip and gives it to Eddie. “We haven’t got the decorations yet.”

The list is small; Cake. Decorations. Dad. Friends. Me. Kisses. Hugs. Lots of Love. Abuela’s cooking. Not Dad’s cooking.

Swallowing, Eddie takes a moment. “Is this what we need for Buck’s birthday?”

Chris nods. “The decorations have to be superheroes too, Dad. Captain America because that’s Bucky’s favourite, but they need to have Buck’s face on.”

Eddie slips the paper into his pocket—his son understands Buck so well that sometimes Eddie doesn’t know what to do with it—and guides the cart after his son. “I don’t think that’s possible, Buddy.”

“Tia Pepa can print out lots of pictures of Buck’s face,” Chris explains, and Eddie keeps one eye on him, the other on the other patrons of the store. “Then we can stick them to the balloons and things.”

Chris rambles as they walk and though Eddie doesn’t know how they’re gonna go about sticking Buck’s face to everything, he dutifully puts the Captain America decorations in the cart. His bank balance isn’t going to thank him, especially with what the replica shield cost him, but Buck’s the second best thing in his life. Eddie gets to spoil him the same way he spoils Christopher. His son isn’t wrong about Buck; he does give his heart, usually in pieces, and doesn’t expect anything back in return. Eddie tries to give it but he knows he’s not the best at emotions and being candid. He’s working on it, and hopefully this party will help.

The cashier runs them through quickly, though she gives Chris a bright smile. “One of your friends having a party?”

“My Papa,” Chris says easily, and Eddie’s heart skips a beat. It never gets old, the words themselves, or the casual intimacy with which Chris says them. The love Buck and Chris have—Eddie knows he’ll never find someone else who loves Chris as much. “He’s never had a party before!”

“Chris,” Eddie says gently. The cashier doesn’t know Buck, but he’s not sure Buck’ll want everyone knowing his business.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Chris says, grinning at the cashier. “Buck doesn’t have to be sad anymore because he’s got us.”

Eddie can’t say anything for a moment, but the cashier kindly gives him the total, holding her hand out for Chris. “You make sure your Papa gets the best party.”

“Yeah,” Chris says, hi-fiving the cashier over the counter. “He’s gonna be excited.”

Excited or pissed off, Eddie thinks, when he sees the state of their house.

The confetti was a terrible idea. There’s no way it’s coming out of the carpet easy even with the tech-heavy vacuum Buck insisted on buying—and knows Eddie fucking hates.

(“It doesn’t suck properly!”

“Maybe it’s been taking lessons from you.”

“Fuck you, Buckley.)

Blowing up balloons is fast becoming the worst preparation for the party and he’s ready to give up when there’s a knock at the door. Only too happy to abandon his assigned task, he yells, “I’ve got it.”

Abuela’s in the backyard with Chris and Eddie’s got no idea what they’re up to. He’s not sure he wants to find out. When he pulls open the door, he grins. Chim and Maddie have arms full with food and gifts, and Eddie gestures them in.

“Gifts on the coffee table, food in the kitchen. No,” he continues at Maddie’s look, “I won’t be touching it.”

Maddie snorts and takes the food through to the kitchen. “Where is Buck anyway?”

“We sent him on an errand,” Eddie explains. “I can’t even remember what, Chris’ idea. Who are you guys supposed to be anyway?”

“I don’t know any superheroes,” Maddie says with a shrug. “Chim picked for me.”

Eddie and Chim share a knowing look. The Buckley lack of pop culture is a shock until you know their history.

“If I’m coming as Falcon,” Chim explains, “She’s gotta be the Winter Soldier.”

“Is this because he’s a guy?” Eddie asks.

“Chim!” Maddie slaps Chim’s arm and he laughs.

“What? You said you wanted to hide your body, not expose it!”

Eddie bites back on another laugh. “Be thankful he didn’t make you come as Man-Ape.”

Maddie obviously doesn’t know who that is, but she settles for beating Chim with a pillow. Eddie’s saved from having to intervene by the doorbell going off again.

It doesn’t take long for the house to fill up; Hen and Karen bring their kids, Bobby and the Grants arrive not long after, and Chris finally comes to find him in the kitchen absolutely not touching anything.

“Dad, I wanna get ready.”

“I thought you were,” Eddie says. “Where’s your outfit, buddy? Are you still going with Superman?”

Chris shakes his head. “No. I asked Abuela to get it for me and Tia Pepa helped. I want you to help me put it on.”

Eddie’s got no idea what’s happening, but he yells to Bobby and Athena that he’s helping Chris get ready and could someone please call Buck and tell him to come home? When he joins Chris in his bedroom, he knows he shouldn’t be surprised to see firefighting gear on the bed.

“I wanted to go as Bucky,” Chris explains, looking at the floor. “I don’t want you to be mad.”

With a pain in his chest that Eddie tries to shove down, he crouches in front of Chris, holding his hands. “I’m not mad, I promise. Why would I be? Buck’s important to you and to me.”

Chris still isn’t smiling. “I love you, Dad, but sometimes people don’t like sharing.”

Eddie doesn’t hesitate, he sweeps Chris into his arms and sits on the end of the bed. Chris gets comfortable, resting his head on Eddie’s shoulder. “Buddy, there’s nothing in this world that I want more than to share you with Buck. Seeing you two happy makes me smile the hardest and you know why?”

“No,” Chris says, shaking his head.

“Because I love you both so much. Sharing you with Buck is easy, mijo, and you shouldn’t ever be sad to tell me you want to be like Buck, or love him, or anything else, okay?”

Chris doesn’t answer for a moment. “Does that mean you won’t be mad about this?”

Eddie looks over his shoulder to see what he’s talking about and almost has a heart attack.

“I need you to help me in the bathroom too,” Chris says, making his way across the hall. Eddie follows, a little emotional about Chris in the firefighter outfit. With his curly hair he passes easily for a younger Buck and Eddie can’t wait for Buck to see him. “I need Buck’s birthmark, Dad.”

Oh, oh no. Eddie almost can’t stand it. “Buddy, that’s great. I didn’t think of that.”

“Buck’s not gonna know otherwise,” Chris says.

“Oh, I think the jacket gives it away,” Eddie says.

Chris watches his face as he sits on the toilet and hands Eddie some face paint. Abuela’s doing again, no doubt. He carefully applies some of the red to Chris’ face; he doesn’t have to look at an image of Buck to know what he’s doing. He’s spent hours of his life memorising every inch of Buck’s body, but especially his birthmark. It’s his favourite place to press a kiss, the best way to elicit a shiver out of Buck, the place he touches when he knows Buck’s sensitive. It’s a reminder for Buck, sometimes, that he’s beautiful inside and out, something Eddie knows he doesn’t believe all that much.

“You’re not mad about the jacket, are you, Daddy?”

Eddie puts down the face paint, rubs his thumb against the mark on Christopher’s eye. He sighs, scratching at the back of his head. “No, buddy. I wanted to do it for his birthday anyway, but I haven’t had time to figure it out.”

Chris nods, looking at his feet, but Eddie places a finger gently under his chin. Chris doesn’t look away. “I want to help you. Buck needs to know we both want him to stay.”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt in his mind,” Eddie says gently, “but I think it’ll help.”

Chris’ smile is worth the discomfort Eddie’s gonna get from this. Buck deserves the world, isn’t that what he’s always saying? Buck’s world is right here; Chris, Eddie, his station family.

“Buck’s here!”

Maddie’s yell breaks them out and Chris panics. “Dad, I’m not ready!”

“Calm down, mijo,” Eddie says, kissing the top of Chris’ head. “We’ll be out there in time.”

Buck’s face when he opens the door is priceless.

The scream he lets out when they yell, “Surprise!” is the best sound Eddie’s ever heard.

When he sees Christopher and starts crying, Eddie thinks he’s probably gonna burst into tears as well.

“Thank you, Chris,” Buck says, pressing his face into Chris’ neck. “You look great.”

“We have to be our favourite superheroes,” Chris says, not protesting when Buck picks him up. He throws his arms around Buck’s neck. “I even had Daddy do your birthmark.”

Buck laughs, kissing the side of Christopher’s face. He pretends to gasp, eyes wide. “So I see.It looks so real!”

Chris giggles, “It’s only face paint!”

“No,” Buck says with exaggeration and yeah, Eddie knew he’s the reason for Chris’ sass. “I thought I was looking in a mirror.”

“Silly,” Chris says.

Buck’s eyes are suspiciously shiny when he tugs Eddie in for a hug, their son trapped between them. Buck’s lips are brushing his ear. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“Myself, apparently,” Eddie says slowly.

“Daddy doesn’t think he’s a hero,” Chris says decisively, “so I had to remind him that he’s your hero!”

Buck looks Eddie in the eye, thumb rubbing the skin beneath his eye. “Damn straight.”

“Shut up,” Eddie says, turning his face away. “Pretty sure that means you’re the one supposed to be wearing this shirt.”

“I don’t know,” Buck says, pitching his voice low. “I like you in your uniform.”

Eddie definitely doesn’t wanna be thinking about that in a packed household. “Come on, Buckley, there are other guests.”

“Oh,” Maddie cuts in, “you remembered us, then?”

A laugh runs around the room, and Buck obliges when Chris asks to be put down. Eddie stays on the periphery, watching Buck do the rounds and getting the hugs and appreciation he deserves. Buck’s surprised by all of it, he knows, and he understands why; Buck’s starved for affection, accepts it from Eddie without hesitation. Still, he doesn’t know his own worth and Eddie’s gonna spend a lifetime showing him.

The cake is a hit. When Chris explains about the heart and giving out pieces, Eddie thinks everyone in the room is a little teary-eyed. Buck gets to bury his in Chris’ hair, and Eddie’s lucky enough to have Abuela nearby to do the same.

“You did good, nieto,” Abuela says, touching his elbow.

Eddie shrugs. “It’s all Chris. I just paid the bill.”

Abuela tuts at him, rolling her eyes. Okay, maybe Abuela’s responsible for 50% of Chris’ sass. “You underestimate yourself, Eddito. We both know how much you love that boy.”

“And everyone else is about to,” Eddie adds dryly. His Abuela’s shrug and lack of shame are obvious, but he can’t bring himself to be sorry that she enabled his son. “How did you know?”

There’s a short silence while Abuela looks at Buck, then back to him. “I didn’t care for Shannon,” she starts, and Eddie doesn’t want to hear this, but Abuela holds up a hand. “I know you loved her and I know she loved Chris, that she wanted what was best for him, but you, Eddie. You were never happy. Not like this.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say. “I was happy.”

“Perhaps,” Abuela allows, “but you didn’t show it. Not like this,” she says quietly. “Not when you look at Evan. You don’t see it yourself, but I haven’t seen you smile and laugh as much as you have these past few years. You’ve changed, Edmundo, and maybe he didn’t change you, but he made you love yourself and for that I can never love him enough.”

“Abuela,” Eddie says and hears his own voice break. She hugs him, kisses his cheek. It’s a lot to take, a lot to hear, but he knows she’s right. Buck does make him happy. He can’t remember the last time he felt the burn of anger, or the overwhelming need to run after a flashback or nightmare. Buck’s always there, guiding him through the pain, reminding him that he’s loved, that he’s got a family. It’s always Buck.

It’s time.

Buck’s in the middle of a conversation with Maddie and Hen about something, so Eddie finds Chris, whispers in his ear that he should get his jacket. Abuela promises to take him, and Eddie heads off Bobby and Karen who both want to talk. “Sorry, I have to do something quick.”

Bobby’s eyebrows raise and Eddie panics that maybe he knows. “Something important?”

“Kinda,” Eddie says, then raises his voice. “Okay, gift time!”

“Eddie,” Buck says, flushing. “We don’t have to do that now.”

Eddie looks at the pile of gifts. “Okay maybe not those, but there is mine.”

“We don’t wanna be a part of this,” Chim cuts in, only to get a slap from Maddie. “What? There are kids here!”

“Which is why,” Eddie says, “this is a PG gift.”

Buck’s staring at him, torn between embarrassment and confusion, but his eyes flick to the doorway, where Chris is coming back into the room. He’s got a turnout jacket on, grinning widely, and Abuela’s gaze finds Eddie. She nods encouragement and he swallows once, twice, and then wipes his sweaty hands on his pants.

“Buddy,” Buck says, sounding awed. “The jacket looks awesome!”

Athena and May, both directly behind Chris, exchange a look and Eddie knows he sees tears in Athena’s eyes. Bobby looks at Eddie and yeah, he definitely knows.

“Wait,” Chris says, “I gotta turn around, Bucky.”

“What—,” Buck starts. His voice cuts off, mouth dropping open as Chris turns around and he sees what’s written on the jacket. “I don’t.”

“Oh,” Maddie says, pressing a hand to his mouth. “Eddie.”

Eddie moves around Chris, sees the lettering stamped on the jacket.

B. Diaz.

“It’s because you’re a Diaz now!”

Christopher’s words have Buck’s gaze flicking to Eddie.

“Almost,” Eddie says, and goes down on one knee.

“Oh my god,” Buck says.

“Oh my god,” Chim echoes.

“Daddy, you have to ask the question,” Chris puts in.

“I’m getting there, Chris,” Eddie says with a laugh. When he’s considered this moment before, he’s always imagined it in private, the two of them mutually proposing, or Eddie doing it at the wrong moment. This feels like the perfect moment; surrounded by family, Chris shoving him along like he always does, and Buck looking at Eddie like he’s surprised he can be so happy. “I love you, Evan,” he says.

“Eddie,” Buck starts. “I love you.”

“I know.” Eddie fumbles for the box in his pocket, the one he’s had buried in his closet for months. “I think if I give a speech, Chris might riot, so I’m just gonna ask; you wanna get married?”

Buck laughs, leans down and drags Eddie into a kiss. “Obviously, idiot.”

When they part, Eddie looks offended. “That’s not nice, Buckley.”

“Diaz,” Buck says breathlessly, pupils dilating. Inappropriate but understandable.

“Diaz,” Eddie agrees. They’re not married yet, but what the fuck ever. Buck’s been a Diaz from the moment he met Chris.

“What the hell kind of proposal,” Chim mutters.

Maddie’s crying, but she still manages to slap Chim on the arm.

Arms come around Eddie’s legs and he laughs, leans down to lift Chris up, who promptly wraps his arms around both Eddie and Buck. “Diazes!”

“Diazes indeed,” Buck says, sounding pleased.

When the sky starts to darken outside, Hen and Karen make noises about leaving.

“Thanks for coming,” Eddie says, hugging Hen tight.

“Are you kidding?” Hen grins. “Who knew you were a closet romantic?”

“I did,” Buck says, handing Nia back to Karen. “Thanks, guys.”

With a quick kiss to Nia’s cheek and a promise to Denny for a sleepover soon, Eddie gives Buck a knowing look. “Spilling my secrets already?”

“What are husbands for?” Buck says with a grin.

Husband. Okay, wow, Eddie’s deliberately not thinking about that word but now it’s out there he can’t not. From the expression on Buck’s face, he knows it.

“Alright boys,” Athena says, shoving at Eddie’s shoulder. “There’s still kids in the house.”

Buck immediately drags her into a hug, and if his wince is anything to go by, Athena’s grip is strong. “Thanks, Athena.”

Touching a hand to Buck’s face, Athena shakes him once. “I’m proud of you, Buck. So proud.”

“Yeah,” Buck breathes, looking like he’s gonna start crying again. Athena kisses his cheek, then steps towards Eddie.

“Don’t hurt me,” Eddie says, holding up his hands.

“Idiot,” Athena chastises, and gives him a bone-crushing hug as well. “I love both of you boys. You take care, you hear me?”

Eddie nods, a little overwhelmed, and catches the tail end of Bobby’s talk with Buck. Buck’s definitely crying, and Bobby’s holding him. Whatever they’re saying is too low for Eddie to make out, but he’s not sure he wants to know. May and Harry interrupt, telling Eddie they’re happy for him, and Michael’s soft congratulations are just as welcome.

“I never thought,” Bobby says, when he finally gets around to saying goodbye to Eddie, “that you’d come this far. All those months ago in my office, I wasn’t sure you’d ever be ready.”

“Neither did I,” Eddie admits. He doesn’t have to ask how Bobby knew, whether or not he’s always been obvious because he knows he has. He’s been afraid of plenty of things in his life, made a ton of mistakes, but this thing with Buck isn’t one of them. Buck himself is the best thing that’s ever come into Eddie and Christopher’s life and he’ll never feel worthy of it. “Thanks for everything.”

Bobby nods, hugging Eddie tight and Eddie returns it.

Eddie loves his father and he knows deep down that his father loves him too, but there’s a lot of shit between them. Loving Bobby is easy, believing that he’s a surrogate son in Bobby’s eyes is easy.

“Take some time,” Bobby says, with a wry smile. “Couple of days. We’ll cover your shifts.”

“I dunno,” Eddie says. “I kinda need to pay for this party.”

Buck flips him off behind Bobby’s back and Bobby looks unimpressed. “I saw that, Evan.”

Maddie, Chim and Abuela are the last to leave.

Maddie’s hug is tight despite her growing belly, and she whispers, “Thank you,” in Eddie’s ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Evan so happy.”

Eddie nods with a shrug. He can feel his face heating up, but he knows he’s grinning like an idiot. “He deserves more of the credit.”

“You’re both dumbasses,” Chim adds, but he gives both of them a tight hug anyway. “I can’t believe you’re gonna marry before us.”

Maddie snorts, but Buck just elbows Eddie. “We have a kid before you too.”

“Ouch,” Chim says, clutching at his chest. “Right for the heart.”

“Sorry about him,” Maddie says with a roll of her eyes. “Come on, idiot. I’m craving pickles and ice cream.”

“Gross,” Chim mouths, but dutifully follows Maddie out of the house. Buck’s making a face as well but Eddie’s never had pickles and ice cream; it sounds like it might be okay.

Abuela’s saying goodbye to Chris, whispering to him in Spanish and Eddie rolls his eyes. He’s sure he doesn’t wanna know what’s happening there. The face paint smudged a little while ago and Abuela wets her thumb, starts to smooth it out, but Chris stops her with a pout.

Laughing, she approaches Eddie and Buck.

“I’m happy,” she says, bringing Eddie in for a hug. “Maddie and I have a lot to talk about, no?”

“Small wedding,” Eddie warns.

Abuela waves him off, and Eddie can only laugh at Buck’s panicked expression. Eddie knows better than to argue with Abuela, but maybe he and Buck can marry first, let Abuela and Maddie have the reception. It’s something they can talk about. Later.

“And you,” Abuela says, dragging Buck into a hug. Buck buries his face in Abuela’s neck and she soothes his hair, whispering something. There’s a lot of whispering and while again, Eddie doesn’t wanna know what she’s saying, it’s because this is just for Buck. Eddie doesn’t know anything about Buck’s grandparents, but he’s taken to Abuela like he did Chris and Eddie both; wholeheartedly and without reservation. “Wednesday, Corazón Salvaje.”

“You got it,” Buck says with a laugh and yeah, he’s definitely crying again.

Eddie rolls his eyes. “I don’t know why you watch that when you can’t understand it.”

“Idiota,” Abuela says, at the same time Buck says, “Stop trying to understand Abuela Time.”

“Abuela Time,” Eddie says, sounding confused.

Buck flushes, but Abuela laughs, patting Buck on the waist. “Later, nieto.”

“Bye, Abuela,” Buck says, and Eddie echoes the sentiment. They wait until Pepa pulls out of the driveway and close the door. Buck turns, making a face at the state of the house. “I hate cleanup.”

“You can vacuum the confetti,” Eddie tells him. “You bought the stupid thing.”

Buck opens his mouth, probably to object, but instead he tugs Eddie in, giving Chris a quick glance. Their son is busy with the TV, queueing up one of Buck’s gifted movies. “You,” Buck says, hands on Eddie’s face, “are the most amazing man.”

“It’s all Chris,” Eddie admits. “Everything. He knew you wanted this, wanted to celebrate. I’m sorry I didn’t know it.”

“This was perfect,” Buck says. “It would have been perfect just us.”

Eddie nods. He knows. “But you have to tell me,” he continues, kissing Buck gently, “when you want something, even if you think I won’t want it. Relationships are a compromise.”

“Marriages are,” Buck agrees, awed.

“Yeah,” Eddie laughs. “So as husbands, we should be honest.”

Buck’s grinning like an idiot as he pulls Eddie in for a tight hug. Eddie feels lighter than he has in weeks, knows this is the start of something amazing.

“I’ll grab the snacks and you get settled on the couch.” Buck pats him on the ass and moves off towards the kitchen. Eddie’s halfway across the room when he remembers about the trash and winces at Buck’s yell. “Eddie Diaz, I am celebrating my birthday so why the HELL is there good food spoiled in the trash?”

“Fuck,” Eddie says.

“Curse word!” Chris adds helpfully.

Eddie sighs. “I can explain!”

He really, really can’t.

[the-magnus-backlogs]

Statement of Suzanna Harkness regarding a manuscript she reviewed for publishing.

Statement taken direct from subject, 27th December 1993.

You wind up stumbling down a lot of weird rabbit holes when you work for a small press long enough. Niche genres you’d really rather remain oblivious to, arts majors trying to break the mould by submitting something they swear up and down you’ll have ‘never seen before’. Never mind if it’s actually legible, but that’s…that’s another matter, I guess. I’m not here to talk about the subpar sci-fi erotica or whatever, I’m here because I found something weird.

I’d like to say right off the bat that I’ve got a strong stomach. Wouldn’t have lasted this long in the company if I didn’t. We only publish a couple hundred books a year, but we take in all sorts around here. Sometimes it feels like our only real submission requirements are ‘unmarketable to the general public’, and it seems like anybody with a half-baked idea is willing to try their luck at tossing their unedited manuscript into the ring.

That’s where I come in. Wading through the mountains of unusable garbage, hunting for hidden gems. I’ve even found a couple, but mostly it’s just about finding something readable. Or something we can pass off as being readable for those rare readers capable of ‘comprehending the author’s artistic vision’. Yeah, the marketing team winds up throwing phrases like that around a lot.

Maybe I’m being unfair. I was a lot more patient about that sort of thing when I started. So preoccupied with not coming across as judgemental, but I’ve worked in publishing over ten years now.

It used to be more common for us to get manuscripts sent in through the post, back then. Nowadays it’s pretty much all done online. A couple we get from literary agents, but most are just emailed in by aspiring writers who stumbled across our site, usually after receiving their rejection letters from the two dozen publishing houses that show up above us on pretty much any search engine.

Every once in a blue moon, though, a manilla envelope will find its way onto my desk. Some bright spark who thinks they’re above using a laptop decides to send their manuscript in the old fashioned way. Sometimes it’s just a precaution in case we somehow miss the half dozen emails they’ve already sent out to every listed staff member on the site. Hell, sometimes it’s written by typewriter.

You know typewriters require special paper to print? Special ink, too. They probably spend more writing the damn thing than they’ll ever see in royalties, but to each their own, I guess. I even got one handwritten, once. The idiot sent a follow-up a month later anxiously asking if he could have it back if we weren’t going to consider it because it was his only copy. Can you imagine? Mailing off the only copy of your handwritten manuscript to some backroom small press without any insurance.

By comparison, this manuscript was relatively normal. It had been typed, I think. The paper was…I guess it was sort of crumpled, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. The postal service isn’t always the most careful about this sort of thing, and it wasn’t really packaged properly. Just shoved loose in a box and shipped out.

It was pre-bound. Just a bundle of papers held together with a few strands of red string. A little unusual, but not exactly throwing up any red flags. Even when I started reading it, I didn’t know. How the hell could I have?

It was good, though. Maybe that should have been my first clue. The prose dragged on a bit, but hey. There are plenty of successful writers out there who probably could have benefited from a harsher editor. They made up for it, in my opinion. Even just skimming those first few pages, I was hooked. Didn’t even really realise it when I was due my lunch break. I was so focused on that damn book.

The visuals were the thing. Plenty of writers can pour out half decent prose, but something about this writer…they had a way of making it feel real, you know? All the little touches, the scenes they crafted from the ground up. It felt…it felt like I couldn’t stop reading. Even if I’d wanted to, and trust me, back then I didn’t.

I didn’t leave my office that day. Barely noticed it when the phone rang, ignored all my emails. I really, really thought we’d accidentally stumbled on a gold mind. Not just a passable debut novel, but an honest to god genuine talent.

The funny thing is, I can’t even really remember what it was that drew me in. Couldn’t tell you what genre it fell under. The plot itself was practically non-existent. A girl who dreamed of being a dancer and crept out of her house to practice under the moonlight in a clearing in the forest behind her house.

Then, one blissful night, illuminated by the full moon, the forest provided her with a partner. The partner.

Nothing too out there, right? Your basic fantasy-romance type stuff. Pretty tame compared to a lot of what we publish, but I was enthralled from the first description of their first dance. Barefoot and so light on her feet her toes barely skimmed the dew-slick grass. They loved each other, and in that moment, I think I understood that. Really knew what it was to love someone so much you’d offer them your still beating heart if it would mean holding onto them for just a second longer.

Except it wasn’t love. Not really. It was an obsession.

I couldn’t stop devouring page after page as their budding romance grew and spiralled, twisting into something unrecognisable. Those whispered words of I can’t live without you became their mantra as they clung to one another so tightly they left bruises on one another’s skin. Soft kisses turned sharp as they came to understand what it was to need to consume and be consumed. They needed one another in a way neither could truly provide. Not really.

In their despair, they begged the forest to offer them a solution, and it gave them one. A way to lie in the sweet summer meadow forever, and in their glee they didn’t think to ask what it would cost.

Not until they began to rot, anyway.

My memories around here get a little hazy, or maybe the words were just less clear. The writing seemed…hurried towards the end, but the couple didn’t seem to mind much when the insects began to burrow through their skin and make their homes inside. They had so much love to give, literally brimming with it. As sickening as it was, it sounded almost…fond. Like the writer truly wanted to give them the happy ending they deserved, but somehow couldn’t think of anything more befitting than allowing their decaying corpses to be infested with creepy crawlies.

It was sick. The concept was sick. Everything about it was sick, but even now I can’t truly convey how vividly they described it. The picture they painted was so clear. Even the affection the insects lavished upon them as they crawled and burrowed through their decaying flesh. It was…God, it used to make me sick just thinking about it, you know that?

Because it wasn’t enough that I had to read it. That I physically couldn’t tear my eyes away. I had to see it. The idea of it…It got its hooks in deep.

By the time I got to the end, I was at a loss for what to do with the manuscript. On the one hand it was probably one of the best written pieces we’d ever received, and there are plenty of twisted readers out there looking for something to churn their stomach.

Somehow it didn’t feel right to publish it, though. I’ve read body horror before, but this…It wasn’t right. I couldn’t…I couldn’t just inflict that on people. How do you make someone understand, truly understand, when they’re signing up to read something that won’t ever let them go? How do you make them understand that the words they’re paying you to read will imprint themselves against the backs of their eyelids? That they’ll grow and spread and fester.

I dream about that dancer in the moonlit meadow. The descriptions of her actual appearance were relatively scarce, but I can still see her face when I close my eyes. I see her intertwined with her dance partner, caked in a mossy fungus that failed to disguise the living hive crawling beneath their skin. I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins, anymore. Not even sure if I could tell them apart looking at them, what with their withered skin being so covered in filth and grime.

That damned book made it sound like something beautiful, but their beauty decayed with their childish notions of romance. They chose to become hollow husks of themselves to make room for the love they could no longer contain, but that’s…that’s not love. It can’t be…right?

So why can’t I stop thinking about the way their fingers intertwined before rigor mortis set in and cemented their bond forever?

I can’t concentrate on anything else anymore. At first it was just a niggling seed of doubt at the back of my mind, but it’s grown so much since then. That image burrowed so deep inside my mind turned its hungry mouth towards the parts of me which were most vulnerable, eating and eating and eating and eating until I could think of nothing else.

I don’t know why I never thought to burn it. Maybe I was worried it would make it worse. Maybe it felt too much like sacrilege. I never read it again after that first time, though I considered it often. It sat on my desk while my other assignments lay scattered around it, disregarded without a second thought. After all, there was no room left in my mind for anything else anymore. Every other passage I tried to read just seemed so…dry. So false. I used to get so invested in the lives of paper people, but now I know what true love is, how could the half-baked notions of romance ever compare?  I tried at first, but by the end I just…stared at it. Waiting.

Maybe if I’d tried to destroy it…Too late now, I suppose. I never let it see the printing presses, but I did let it go in the end. Some old man came in asking for it specifically. Something about it being a collectable.

I don’t know how an unpublished manuscript could be considered a collector’s item, and frankly I didn’t ask. I’m not sure if I even really cared about what he’d do with it by that point. Did it bother me that I might be condemning him to share my fate? It doesn’t now, I know that much.

It’s…I was hoping this might help me clear things up, but I just couldn’t see any of it straight. I can’t see anything, anymore. Not really. It may have started in my dreams, but once I let her in…They’re everywhere, now. I saw him in the faces of my colleagues before the press finally let me go… I don’t remember how long ago now. I think the power company cut the power at some point. It doesn’t matter now.

The funny thing is, I really thought they cared about me. They did, at first. I think. It all sort of blurs together, but I remember how they used to talk about me when they thought I couldn’t hear. The nervous looks they’d send me when I zoned out at my desks. Then they staged their first intervention, and I saw it. I saw her. It was the man I saw painted across the features of everyone I knew, in the arches of eyebrows and slants of cheekbones, but it was her I saw reflected in their eyes.

It was her I saw in the mirror, before they ran out of space inside my skull, and the maggots took my eyes…or maybe I imagined that part too.

I’m pretty sure it’s too late for me now, but when I heard about you guys I figured it was worth a shot. I’m full of it. Whatever that feverish contagion that claimed the couple was. That sickly, rotting thing they mistook for love. I can feel it now. I can understand it now and it’s so much. Already I’m on the brink of bursting with it, I think.

I just can’t wait to share.

[rachelthompsonauthor]

Writing fears suck, don’t they? If you’re a writer, you have them, no matter where you are in your career. Yet writing fears are especially ominous when you’re first starting out. The endless loop of:

What if I’m not good enough?

What if people hate my book?

What if someone gets hurt by my book?

What if people write horrible reviews?

What if what I think is good is just crap?

and on it goes.

I can fully relate. I didn’t start my writing career until my forties (I’m 55 now) for many of those same reasons. I also didn’t know how to start – what’s the proper, right way to start? To publish? To market? It’s overwhelming for someone just starting out, especially if that someone is super process-oriented like me.

Are These Fears Valid?

Of course, they are. All feelings are valid, even if they aren’t always logical (like toddlers in the sandbox, thinking and feeling don’t always get along or agree). For more on this, here’s an article you might find helpful from Scribed Media: 6 Writing Fears and How to Beat Them. 

I work with many writers (as both a survivor and advocate, as well as in my BadRedhead Media business) who don’t give themselves permission to write because of these fears. Here’s what helped me – and it’s so simple it’s almost stupid. A quote. One quote. I’m almost embarrassed to share how enormous an effect that one little quote had on me; how it freed me from my mental fear prison, yet it did.

From Lorrie Moore, author and professor, via a widely quoted interview in Elle Magazine

“Compared with her students, who are often still deeply involved with their parents, Moore says she had a more formal, old-fashioned relationship with hers—which helped her make the “romantic and bloody-minded” decision to commit wholly to her art when she started writing seriously in college. (“The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, `Write something you’d never show your mother or father.‘ And you know what they say?” she says, wide-eyed with disbelief.” `I could never do that!'”).

That’s it. I wasn’t even a college student – I was a full-grown adult with my own kids. There I sat with a pen and paper (okay, computer laptop) on my desk, journals at the side, ready to write about uncomfortable truths. Sexual topics. Surviving sexual abuse, sexual interactions with past lovers, relationships, PTSD, triggers, and other ‘things’ you don’t typically talk to your own parents about.

And I thought: Geez, Rach. You’re forty-fucking years old. Stop thinking about what other people will think (Nonfiction Writing 101: You cannot know what someone else thinks – only what you think). So, I went for it.

You’re an adult. Write like one. 

And with that, I started to write my first memoir/poetry book, Broken Pieces.

Drawer Of Fears

Take a piece of paper (I suggest a page in your journal or in your online notepad). Write down your list of writing fears. Write down everything you’re afraid of, whether it’s based in reality or sounds like something full of magical fairy dust. Whatever it is, write it down. Pages and pages, or three little bullet points. Whatever.

Okay? When you’re done, come on back. Oh, be sure to print out what we’ll call your Page Of Fears.

***

Good, you’re back. Now take that piece of paper with all your fears and put it away in your Drawer of Fears. Make sure that drawer has a lock (or needs a password). Physically give them a kiss, and tell them goodbye.

Don’t worry! They’ll still be there. You can visit them anytime you want to. However, for now, I want you to know that you have cleared them from your mind and body. Kinda like burning sage but without the burning. Or the sage.

Writers cannot write around clutter. It’s a known fact.

Let Go Of Your Perfection Fears

Your first draft is where you start. Your first draft of whatever it is that you want to write. You may not even know and that’s okay.

This stumped me at first. And when I say stumped, I mean I did not move from the doing anything about with my writing stage for years. Where do I start? How do I structure my writing? Don’t professional writers have official outlines and plots and characters with histories and plots all devised, etc? Well, sure, some do. However, some don’t. Plotters vs. Pantsers, etc.

This entire thought process alone sent me into Analysis Paralysis. What’s the right way?

As a creative nonfiction writer, I didn’t know how I wanted to format my writing. I did kinda sorta know my thematic structure (which, by the way, completely changed after my first developmental edit) – I also knew I planned to work with a structural (aka, developmental) editor, so I took that fear (see point number two) of how to make it “perfect” in the end, put that in my Drawer of Fear, and wrote what I refer to as my word vomit.

Just Start Writing

Nobody will see what you are writing unless you want them to. I repeat: nobody will see what you’re writing unless you want them to. It could take you a month, a year, or several years before you reach the point where your writing is in publishable condition.

Your ‘shitty first draft’ needs to be free-flowing, non-self-edited crapadoodle. You hear me, you little perfectionistic drones? Give yourself permission to purge your words. 

It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to make any sense which, honestly, is why journaling is so great. It’s a wonderful mental purge and can be a great stepping-off point to your writing. (Need help getting started? Visit the fabulous Leigh Shulman. She’s got a free plan for you.)

Your first draft is not even your dress-rehearsal. It’s more like…practice. It’s just a draft. It could take 30 or 50 or 100 or 300 drafts before it becomes a book.

Then you keep at it. Writing isn’t a walk in the park. It’s work. It’s a job. It’s a career if you decide to make it one and you’re good at it. And you work hard to become a better writer. Whether you believe in the 10,000 hours concept or the old ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice,’ joke – either way, the only way to become a better writer is to learn how to become a better writer.

How did I get better? Even though I took a number of classes growing up (in high school and college), I didn’t feel that prepared me for how I wanted to write now. So, I read a ton of creative nonfiction books (some of my favorites are below) in the style that appealed to me. I took online classes that helped me improve my writing. I went to readings by writers I admired (most are free or cost the price of the book).

I continued journaling (as I had been since I was a kid). And I continued writing – all kinds of stuff – articles, short stories, poetry, ideas for articles, short stories, and poems. And I began blogging (in 2008). Blogging absolutely makes you a better writer and I’ll fight anybody who says otherwise. Rawr.

Investing in myself helped me get over my fears. To face my fears. To crush my fears.

Don’t Forget About Your Fears Completely

Everything I mentioned above took time. Just about every writer I’ve ever met wants their first book to be a massive bestseller right away, pay off all their bills with the royalties, sit on Oprah’s couch because of it, and have everyone reading it on the train a la Fifty Shades.

That’s all great. How are you going to make that happen?

Have realistic expectations. Have a plan. Write the most fantastic, professional book you can. Figure out what you don’t know about not only writing but also marketing and publishing, and then learn.

Above anything else, deal with your fears. They’ll still be in that drawer, waiting for you. Just like trauma, your fears don’t magically disappear because you’ve set them aside. They’ll pop up like that whack-a-mole game, except now you’ll have experience and time to hit them back with.

And yet…I don’t recommend hitting your fears back like an enemy. Change that paradigm. Make friends with them. How can your fears help you? What is it about a specific fear that’s got you so wound up?

Sometimes, it’s what we fear most that motivates us.

Just as I discuss how I made friends with Shame in my fourth book, Broken Places, do the same with your Page of Fears. Make your fear work for you so you can become the writer you want to be. You’ve lived through so much, writer friends! You can absolutely write about it.

I know you have it in you.

  Here is a list of my personal favorite creative nonfiction books (disclosure: affiliate links provided).* I also recommend reading short stories by Raymond Carver. He’s a master storyteller.

*Note: These are not books about writing creative nonfiction. That’s a future post.

Calypso by David Sedaris

Night by Elie Wiesel

First, We Make The Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety by Sarah Wilson

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

The post How To Crush Your Writing Fears Right Now appeared first on Rachel Thompson.

via Rachel Thompson

[middleagedangst]

A Penny for your Health?

You see it sitting there, on the countertop positioned conveniently next to the change dispenser. You sometimes reach your hand in and take from it because you’re lazy or selfish. Other times, you’ll empty your hand into it simply because it’s harder to open your pack of Marlboro Lights while carrying out your six-pack of Busch Light with change in your hand. I get it. No judgment here. What is this well of human generosity? The penny tray. Seen in all 50 states in nearly every gas station convenience store. The very idea of it is pretty great. Take a penny, leave a penny. Fucking genius. I mean why not drop a few cents in there anyway? It’s like a pay-it-forward savings account. It’s a way to be a good person while putting in the least amount of actual effort, an important quality of our American social contract. Besides, isn’t it better to help out your fellow man than to totally forget you even have that extra change until you either find it under the couch cushion next to a Dorito of questionable age or even months later in the pocket of last winter’s coat? Shit, it’s only a penny unless you’re one of those really rich motherfuckers that leave something bigger than a nickel.

I can’t remember a time that these trays didn’t exist, and I’m older than the SyFy channel and the original NES. As far as I’m concerned, the penny tray is a part of America, like NASCAR and cheating on your taxes. And the funny thing about it is anyone can use it, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, place in the economic strata, whatever gender pronoun you are, etc., without so much as an utterance of disdain or unfairness. It’s true. Never once have I seen protest from the skinheads, or the Black Panthers, Westbrook Baptists, the anti-war hippies, the ACLU, not even fucking Scientology. Nobody gives a flying rat’s ass that these things exist. So why the fuck can’t we have this same outlook on other things that might actually be of some use for the nation as a whole? Like, say, healthcare.

Healthcare coverage in the U.S. is pretty fucked up when you think about it. People usually get the best options through their employer, but just like friends with benefits, it starts out great but sooner or later it comes with some strings attached. For one, employers don’t have to offer group rates, or even offer coverage to employees working part-time or doing contract work. Even then if you do get coverage through your employer and you have a pre-existing condition, like diabetes, then the insurance company can tell you to get bent and deny service. Even better, when you do have insurance but they conveniently deny paying for treatment because something is out of network, or not covered by your plan as stated in the fine print that nobody reads. And don’t get me started on dental insurance. The people that usually need it the most, the poor and the elderly on fixed incomes, have trouble affording it and oftentimes rely on cut-rate plans or Medicaid (which has plenty of its own faults). On top of all this, private insurance doesn’t do a damn thing when it comes to controlling costs, because why can’t the medical and pharmaceutical industries rake in a fuck-ton of money from a chemically dependent consumer base that’s getting bent over and prison raped from a lack of options. It’s an awful lot like a strong arm robbery just for the privilege to get treated when you think about it. That’s capitalism’s influence for you. Anything else is unAmerican and downright evil, right?

There has been a lot of debate on what we can do as a nation and body politic that can help millions get healthcare that isn’t frustratingly shitty and increasingly expensive. For starters, some believe we should just leave the shit as it is and not change anything. Let the free markets reign supreme and the weak will die off leaving a healthy race of super citizens. Under this solution, you are free to choose the insurance company you want to pay your ransom to and they handle the rest. The companies dictate how much you pay and how much they pay or if they pay for any service or medication. Have you ever tried to negotiate what you actually get for your money? No? Didn’t think so. This solution is American as fuck so the argument should stop here, but what fun would that be just listening to one option and calling it a day. That’s like watching the same news channel all day.

Another solution is a more socialist approach in which you pass a law that levies a tax on all Americans earning income and then whatever government bureaucracy is in charge of the money pays out benefits to all Americans. The will of the people can then, through representation, effectively bargain for better prices and more expansive coverage because at that point our tax money is the only game in town. See, I know that’s not the American way, that’s the way of the rest of the civilized world’s way and how can the United States be special if we do the same shit the rest of the developed world does? We can't, and that’s why that commie shit isn’t welcome here.

Now I dare ask the question, what’s the fucking difference? Really. What is it? Because as far as I can tell, both possible solutions are the fucking same. You pay money into a big pot, where there are people hired or appointed into positions that control the money and payouts are dispersed on an as needed basis. When you get a bill from a hospital or doctor’s office and you only owe a fraction of the total, where do you think that money comes from? It sure as hell isn’t all the money you paid the company because that would be more like a rainy day savings account. No, other people paid their monthly bill allowing more money to be used for you. Everyone paying money to the insurance company helped you pay that bill. And just like the tray at the gas station, you’re okay with that. Sometimes, the insurance company doesn’t want to pay that much. Maybe it was an unhealthy month and there were a lot of claims, or the board didn’t think you were worth saving. Who knows. Either way, your bill was subsidized by your fellow policyholders. So to everyone that likes to say that they don’t want to pay for someone else’s healthcare “cuz, this is Amurica, and that’s commeynism,”- shut the fuck up because if you have insurance or pay taxes, you already do.

Can someone explain to me how buying healthcare coverage is different than paying a tax for the exact same or possibly even better outcome? Is the fact that you voluntarily pay money to a business for a servi™ce mean that you are freer? I can’t wrap my mind around how just because it's a business doesn’t mean the concept isn't a socialist idea. It just is.

Maybe there is a difference. Perhaps that difference is that a private corporation operates with profit in mind. These entities, especially in this day and age with boards of directors and publicly traded stock have more incentives to make money, meaning higher prices and fewer expenditures. Now, I’ll grant you that the government can be real fucking dumb, but these corporations are profiting on your desire to not be fucking sick while maintaining the right to deny coverage for any reason. Pre-existing condition? Fuck you, you’re a high priced liability. Cancer? We’ll pay some but you’re still getting stuck with a bill you most likely can’t afford. Want to see a healthcare provider that’s out of network? Fuck you too. These insurance companies can be real fucking assholes sometimes. In my opinion, by supporting this system, you give a tacit agreement to this shit continuing. So you’re an asshole too. Sorry. Guilt by association.

I’m not saying government-funded healthcare is perfect. Far from it. Especially with the current government we have. They’ve lost money before and most likely will again. They’ve borrowed from social security. They’ve been openly corrupt. I get it. We shouldn’t really trust these motherfuckers with much, but it could be better than what we have now. The people united and holding those in power accountable through elections and protests. It is, after all, the job of the government to work for the people, for their betterment and safety, to regulate commerce between the states, and to work towards a common goal. All of those things government tax-funded healthcare can provide. Remember finishing the pledge of allegiance with “liberty and justice for all?” Think about the liberty you’d have not having to worry about the cost of being sick and the justice knowing that your fellow American chips in to help his neighbor because it is the morally correct and just thing to do. It still falls short of utopian but at least it's a step in the right direction. Do I think everything should be covered under the people’s insurance? No. I don’t. Sorry, but your penile implant will just have to wait until you can pay cash.

The health of the people shouldn’t be a for-profit industry. It belongs outside the realm of normal capitalist behavior. Healthcare is something that benefits us all. And the healthier the nation is, the more productive, the happier, and better off we can all be. Right now, the healthy are the ones who can afford it. Is that right? Depends on who you ask. Is it just? Not in what should be a united, civilized people. How can us Americans sit by and watch our fellow citizens fall sick, stay sick, and possibly die and not think that the system has failed somehow? It’s morally bankrupt. Also never forget that we as a nation pay more per person on average than many of the other countries with socialized medicine. So even at the very least, socialized medicine can save you a buck or two. And who doesn’t like to save money? It’s certainly less time consuming than clipping fucking coupons.

So just like the little penny tray, a new system of healthcare can be a benefit to everyone, not just those that can afford it already. You put in a little and other times take what you need without questions. It’s there when you need it and can make your day just that much easier. Let’s, as Americans, make the tray just a bit bigger and make things a little better for everyone. You’re already doing it and just didn’t realize it, comrade.

[kholoudnine]

THE ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS

Hey guys!

So I have just come out of last weekend's book fest, am writing this at like 4am waiting for my sleep aids to finally kick in because I really should be going to bed now, and I thought It'd be a good time to start a blog post.

This past week has been crazy and just picking up more and more as it goes on. I've been ordering books, selling to stores(more to come on that little detail soon), signing up for signings in other states, booking meetings, and getting together more places to perform my art live. It's a work out for sure but the more I do the clouser I feel like I am to where I wanna be in life, so it's all worth a little lack of sleep. Although I have been making a commitment to sticking to a decent regemin for taking care of myself. If you read my poetry, you know I struggle with this daily, but if I wanna be at my best on stage and at signings and in my work, than it's an important step. It's also something I wanna encourage. For people not to just accept the narrative of being unhealthy and tired, if you're unhealthy and tired, strive to change that. I have so many ideas for blog posts and videos about how I've been going about doing that which I hope you'll enjoy and take something from. This post though, I wanted to talk about something that I've been asked for a lot lately, advice.

Now I knew when I started this that there would be people who looked up to me and people who want to know I did it and want to know what they can do for their dream and just wanna know more about my journey, the thing about that was just I thought all that as a little kid and I thought it'd be something that came from record deals and being rich and screaming stadiums, never did I think my self-published books and my open mic performances would draw so many people asking me for guidance through their own journey or draw so much curiosity for how I got where I am today (which for a time I thought wasn't very far). I've even been mistaken as a professional in the craft, someone with years of signings and publishing under their belt. This got me thinking, what exactly makes a professional, and what do I have to offer?

So for the people who ask me about my experience, I've pretty much been at this my whole life. It's been a constant uphill battle for me with anxiety and doubt and obstacles of all sort pushing back, but since I was a little child dressed as Hannah Montana and using letter stencils to write songs I was sure this is when I wanted. Something I need. That meant going to every free class I could find. The library funded a lot of my passion and education, with improv and acting classes, guitar lessons, computer courses, open mics, and workshops. I lived in libraries. I would read books about design and flip through adventures, I'd sit in the stacks learning about podcasts, I took photography and leadership in freshman and sophomore year of high school (for the gods' awful times I was in online school *shudders*). I still go to those classes now, the maker's space is going to help me tremendously in the next coming year. I'm so excited about it all still. For a long time with all those classes, I was still the quiet one. Even with all these teachers believing in me, I couldn't beileve in my own voice. I didn't think I could speak, and around my peers I was still weird, so I was quiet. Until JYPS workshop, that is when I was put on a stage for the first time in my teenage career. Working with the group definitely drove me to who I am now, instead of just being taught poetry, I was taught business, I was taught to stand on corners and give out flyers, to promote myself, to be confident and build connections, and I still go now. I'll be there this weekend, learning just like everyone else will be. This is where I found my voice. So as you can see, I've got experience, but I'm still trying to learn more. I don't really think I'll ever not be a student.

Knowing that, I will now give my best advice. I'm going to break it down into FAQ's because I do get a lot of questions, and most are more or less the same things.

1. How Do yoU Find Events?

I find all of my events through my mum and word of mouth. My mother started releasing books about a year before I did and she finds a lot of the events this year since most are ones she researched years prior. Other events I find through the library system and old fashioned word of mouth, it is not uncommon for people to come to my performances or see me at a signing and invite me to another somewhere else. Networking is key. Always remember to talk to people at these things as you'll never know who you'll meet. Do not be afraid to ASK "Hey can I preform here? Hey what signings are there in town? Hey Siri search local book signings?" You'll find something surely.

2. How Do You Find Inspiration?

Everywhere. My life, other books and art, music, dancing, etc. I've been dancing and gotten entire scenes in my head randomly or laying back and listening to music then I'll start replaying the song as a whole outline shows itself to me. It's really a magickal thing, being an artist. It does take practice for some to get to that level of spacey but you can always start by writing about what you know. Many scenes or emotions or characters in my books can be connected to my life in some way or another, maybe an altered moment, maybe a name I heard, maybe a character that reminds me heavily of a friend. Start with writing what you know, I will occasionally write out my thoughts like a novel when I'm trying to sort things out or I'm in a funk, find your thing.

3. How Do You Get Over Stage Fright?

You just do it. Get on stage, it's really the only way I've found to deal with it. A lot of people don't know this but I do have grand stage fright, to the point of running off the stage when I was younger actually. It still bothers me and I'm in constant management with it. If you don't get on stage you'll surely never get over it. Start small. For me going up and performing in front of people who don't know me, acting as a character who was not me, would help tremendously. Occassionally I'll still channel some more confident and emotionally showing version of myself for my performances, it's whatever works as a small step for you. Some people feel more comfortable anon like me, but others may want to start by preforming in front of people they trust and slowly work their way to strangers. Don't push yourself too far to fast, and don't worry about if you start by running off the stage, you get over it.

4. How Do You Self-Publish?

There are several ways to self-publish your books, the way I chose to go through primarily was Amazon. I put my books on their website (not signing their exclusivity contract) and then I can sell it other places. So I've also been trying to add my books to Lulu, I have previews up on Tablo and Wattpad, and I'm selling them to a local bookstore. Amazon prints my books so I do pay them to order the copies but I do not pay the same price as a normal costumer, since they are mine I only pay the cost of shipping and printing. You can find loads of other self-publishing routes with some diligent research, look around and find what's right for you, don't be afraid to ask other authors who self-publish questions at book signings, many are willing to help others.

5. What are the benefits of self publishing?

Since I self-publish my book I get to tell the story my way, without some of the hurtles trade might give me. For instance, my books are quite dark and do contain not only strong language but descriptive violence. When JK Rowling was publishing Harry Potter, Ron actually swore quite a lot, but because the publisher felt the book series would appeal so well to children, they had her change that about the character so as not to poke any parents. Prisoner Nineteen could bring a very wide audience (though I in no way compare my work to Harry Potter) but seeing as the characters are mostly quite young (the main being only fourteen) I could see it drawing in a younger crowd than would be expected for a series like it, because I published it myself, I don't have to worry about that. I market it as YA, and really leave it up to the reader (and their parents) what they feel comfortable reading. This for me is the biggest plus of self-publishing, you get no deadlines and complete creative freedom.

6. How Do You Write A Book?

I can't exactly tell you that. Everyone has a different way of writing their book, I've seen a million different writing styles and writing processes, it's really up to you how you write your book. As for finshing it, what helped me was having a clear goal and deadline in mind.

7. How Do You Balance Everything?

Chaotically. I'm definitely not going to lie and say this is all super easy. Meetings, school, art projects, volunteering, blogs, writing, signings, performances, and whatever else I have to do that week balanced on having a social life and not going crazy? It's not exactly easy. And occasionally you will probably freak out and/or cry from stress and anxiety, that does happen to me sometimes, but if it's what you want to be doing and I mean really want to be doing? Oddly enough, it doesn't feel like work a lot of the times. It feels great to be able to be doing something you actually love and want to be doing. If going a little bit crazy is a part of the process, eh, just makes for better writing and more theatrics. Did the sane man really ever make great art or great changes?

8. How Do You Get Your Stuff?

So usually this is directed towards my merch. Everything you see on my tables is customised and designed by yours truly (save for things like my lights or shell). I get an idea, I plan it out, and I then search all over the internet to find my supplies. (Honey really helps with this. Save money, create smarter.) Look on Pinterest or Tumblr or at other cons to try and think of something that fits your book.

9. How Do You Find The Courage?

Caffeine. Straight to the vein. I just get an iv drip before every apperence.

No but, really it's a lot of channeling your nerves into your work. Of deciding if this is really really really something you wanna be doing. If the answer to that is yes? You'll find your courage and strength. A support system doesn't hurt. If that can't be friends or parents, then you can find it in groups. Look around your local art scene. I'm sure somewhere there's a workshop or two, check on NaNaWrimo they do video chats, join a group on social media, find a pen pal, but nothing can really replace knowing people are rooting for you and knowing that you're working towards your dream goals.

10. How old are you?

I am eighteen years old and my birthday is June 24th, so. You're certainly not too young to do something and make decisions with your life. There is no "starting age" that's when you decide it is.

And to close, the thing that makes you a professional. I really didn't know, but a friend of mine posted online a few days ago "You are a rapper if you are rapping." This I think is true in all things. Especially in art, there is no point when you should ever stop learning, but you are what you are. If you sing, and you're serious about it, you are a singer. If you dance, and you're serious about it, you are a dancer. If you act, and you're serious about it, you are a dancer. If you write, and you're serious about it, you are a writer.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF YOURSELF

The real problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup has to make something people want. This should be the m. You learn to paint mostly by doing it, but by then it's too late. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it, even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive. I've read on HN.1 And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter.

Less fortunate startups just end up in an uncanny valley.2 It was painful to watch. If Sun runs into trouble, they could drag Java down with them. The first is probably the effort required just to start a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The suit is back, it begins. It doesn't do justice to the situation to say never mind, I'm just tired. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to say that to Japanese or Europeans it would seem like something out of the third world. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. Even Einstein probably had moments when he was optimistic. A lot of VCs would have rejected Microsoft.

Judging startups is hard even for the best investors, who are both hard to bluff and who already believe most other investors are conventional-minded drones doomed always to miss the big outliers.3 We decided we ought to have T-Shirts for the SFP, and we'd been thinking about what to do by a boss.4 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way a painting is made.5 Your program is supposed to do x. Either it's something they felt they had to do. When I learned to program, we had to read in English classes was mostly fiction, so I was haunting galleries anyway. It's also great for morale.6 And so it became synonymous with California nuttiness.7 And it's a good thing. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for appearing to be writing about things I don't understand.

I write great software, because they were so much easier.8 In fact, software that would let people who wanted sites make their own investment decisions. The time to raise money, they try gamely to make the region a center of scholarship and industry which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize.9 I made the list there turned out to be enough. Best of all, for the same reason readers like them. But as one VC told me after a startup he funded would only take about half a million, I don't mean play mind games with yourself to boost your confidence. When I read about people who liked what they did so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Both have the kind of thing for fun. They give employees who do great work for free, in their spare time, and investors are down on advertising at the moment.10 But as one VC told me after a startup he funded would only take about half a million, I don't mean any specific business can. In a startup you have to overcome in order to avoid them, I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than the valuation of our entire company.

But the importance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as buying printed books was the only way to know for sure would be to discover each person's station as early as possible, and the higher your valuation, the narrower your options for doing that. Raising money decreases the risk of failure. Some will be shocking by present standards. Your own ideas about what's possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences.11 You may not need to use convertible notes to do it. At Viaweb I considered myself lucky if I got to hack a quarter of the time ranged from tedious to terrifying.12 Prestige is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. Conversely, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same spirit. The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from most people's idea of what business is like.13 Since the custom is to write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader.

Of course, figuring out what you like, and let prestige take care of you: they'd try not to fire you, cover your medical expenses, and support you in old age.14 The most interesting question here may be what high res fundraising will do to the world, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor.15 So am I claiming that no one would dare express it in public?16 And in particular, to great universities.17 But the more you realize you can do than the traditional employer-employee relationship because I've been on both sides of a better one: the investor-founder relationship. O-data.18 Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness. Indians in the current Silicon Valley. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to grow. I'm not too worried yet.

It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. Each year.19 But publishing has advanced since then: present-day union organizers rather than an attack on early ones.20 What weaknesses could you exploit? It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried writing programs in it. Cheap Intel processors, of the forces underlying open source and blogging. At the time, could get excited about such a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should start paying attention. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to describe it as a book. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it does at least make you keep an open mind.21 That cap need not simply rise monotonically. True, but I can't believe we've considered every alternative.

Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to do. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas. In Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix.22 And what, exactly, is hate speech? And yet I suspect no one dares say this. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the partner responsible for the deal was John Doerr, who came to work for our company.23 If you set up those conditions within the US, there are at least some of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. If you try convincing investors before you've convinced yourself, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of pro-union readers, the first three were our biggest expenses. If we turn off our self-centeredness in that they assume admissions committees care enough about so far is not very good. Painters in fact have to remember a good deal for everyone.24 A more important source, because it's the only way out.

Notes

The idea is the most promising opportunities, it becomes an advantage to be identified with you to commit to them. Hackers Painters, what you call the Metaphysics came after meta after the fact by someone else created earlier.

A P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its users, however, and this was the fall of 2008 the terms they were.

I.

The lowest point occurred when marginal income tax rates were highest: 14. Make sure too that the stuff they're showing him is something inexperienced founders. So whatever market you're in, you'll be well on your own?

What I'm claiming with the melon seed model is more important than the valuation turns out to be able to grow as big as a child, either as an idea that evolves naturally, and that he had once talked to mentioned how much he liked his work. We're delighted to have to pass so slowly for them. Doing things that don't include the cases where you go to die from running through their initial attitude. That's a valid point.

That's because the rich. In this essay I'm talking mainly about software startups are possible. Since most VCs are suits at heart, the bad idea.

I calculated it once for that might work is in the sort of pious crap you were going back to the Pall Mall Gazette. Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically.

The founders want the valuation of zero.

And I'm sure for every startup we had high hopes for doesn't do well, but not in the technology everyone was going to kill bad comments to solve are random, the only alternative would be to go out running or sit home and watch TV, music, and stir. I'm not claiming founders sit down and calculate the expected value calculation for potential founders, and that there's no lower bound to its precision. In fact, for example, would probably never have that glazed over look. So it's not the only ones that matter financially, and he was notoriously improvident and was troubled by debts all his life.

What you learn via users anyway. When Google adopted Don't be evil. But while it makes people dumber.

The idea is not yet released.

I stuck with such energy that he had once talked to a degree that alarmed his family, that it offers a better predictor of success. Programming languages should be designed to express algorithms, and so on. But when you ad lib you end up with much food.

It's when they're really saying is they want to stay in a bug.

In fact this would probably be to become one of the increase in economic inequality, but he turned them down. Cost, again. Wolter, Allan trans, Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. The trend of VC angel investing is so contentious is that the middle class first appeared in northern Italy and the cost of writing software.

Give us 10 million and we'll tell you alarming things, they will or at least a little more fat, and the editor, written in 6502 machine language. Related: Reprinted in Bacon, Alan ed.

Looking at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. Most of the next stage tend to become more stratified.

In some cases e.

We think we're so useless that in Silicon Valley. This is not economic inequality was really only useful for one video stream. They don't know how many of which you want to get endless grief for classifying religion as well, but which didn't taste very good. College English Departments Come From?

N 12-oz cans white, kidney, or in one of those things that's not true! That should probably be the only audience for your work. The downside is that parties shouldn't be that some of those most vocal on the client?

But it was because he was 10 years ago it would have seemed a miracle of workmanship. Our founder meant a photograph of a startup. Few consciously realize that species weren't, as accurate to call the Metaphysics came after meta after the egalitarian pressures of World War II the tax codes were so bad that they think are bad. Every pilot knows about this problem, any claim to the customer: you post a sign in a place where few succeed is hardly free.

Wolter, Allan trans, Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. It's interesting to consider behaving the opposite way from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. The CRM114 Discriminator. If you want to work on projects that improve the world, but starting a startup, unless it was wiser for them, and one of the market.

If anyone remembers such an idea is bad. A day job writing software. What you learn in college. The other reason it used to hear about the details.

There was one of the best ways to get the money they're paid isn't a quid pro quo. Few can have a connection to one of the causes of the other reason they pay so well.

As I was not something big companies to say they care above all about to give him 95% of spam in my incoming mail fluctuated so much a great discovery often seems obvious in retrospect. I don't think it's confusion or lack of movement between companies combined with self-imposed. 99, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from those of dynamic variables were merely optimization advice, before realizing that that's what they said, and jobs encourage cooperation, not widening. Since they don't yet get what they're really not, and earns the right sort of pious crap you were doing Viaweb again, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

[licheninsect]

GameStop, the natural experiment

Someone, reminding me of my 10-year-old debate with Robin Hanson, texted me and said: this GameStop short squeeze proves your point about futarchy, doesn’t it?

Well, kind of. It’s certainly an interesting uncontrolled event. Arguably GameStop does more to prove my point about asset transformation and systemic risk. But it is also an instance of market coordination (stop saying the m-word, which is a pejorative), which in a broad general sense is also the problem with Professor Hanson’s futarchy.

The most general possible point of the experiment is that market coordination works. If a market price is a pure effect that causes nothing further, the market is theoretically efficient. But once the price signal becomes a cause—as in futarchy, where markets control political decisions, or as in a short squeeze, where price signals trigger further buying—the side effects of that cause may give market participants ulterior motives to make bets which are intentionally inefficient.

(Professor Hanson at last report still refuses to concede the overwhelming power of my perspicacious objections—Professor, you may name the time, the place, and the arms.)

Since r/wsb is a mob and not an army, the $GME squeeze is decentralized coordination. This phenomenon is also of political interest. In addition to being (mostly) centerless, which makes it highly defensible, the players are organized not by commitment but by cohesion—they are buying $GME not because they believe in the company, but because they believe in each other. Here is a collective action which is effective, yet nihilistic—something under heaven and earth, which may not be in your political philosophy.

So we have a double natural experiment: in both economics and political science. No wonder everyone thinks this GameStop thing is so cool.

(TLDR: my guess is that what will pop the bubble is either some kind of SEC order, or GameStop issuing new shares, But even this will be hard.

My best guess: SEC tells GameStop to issue new shares. My ideal policy: the Fed reprivatizes GameStop—buying it at its current valuation, cashing out all positions long or short at their present value, then auctioning the equity back to the market.)

Economics for retards

When the “retards” of r/wsb say “I like this stock,” their retardation is purely ironic. They don’t actually like this stock. (Except that GameStop was already a 4chan meme.)

Their interest in this stock is not related to its current or prospective price-to-earnings ratio, its dividend stream, the assets on its books—or any of that lame-ass bullshit. Hey boomer! Want to know something? You can’t say “asset” without “ass.”

Market coordination is any activity, organized or spontaneous, that affects a price signal for ulterior reasons—with trades motivated not by the security’s expected return, but by the hope of influencing some side effect caused by the price signal. In the case of a squeeze, that side effect is forced buying by screaming, tortured shorts.

The efficiency of markets is super-tempting as an epistemic tool. The market, it seems, is always right. So why not always do what the market tells us to do? Why not link decisions to market outcomes? Because as soon as we let the market tell us what to do—the market is no longer always right.

Every time you link a market signal to some side effect, you are leaking that effect’s power backward into the market. You want the causality to flow only forward. But the pipe has no valve. So the market becomes contaminated with power.

Anyone who can coordinate a market signal can also coordinate any side effects—and often has some incentive to do so. If there is such an incentive, your market will find itself befouled with uneconomic trades—and its signal’s accuracy will be ruined. And that’s why, as I write, $GME is not priced according to textbook fundamentals.

(Don’t worry if you don’t quite get this—we’ll go over it again in way more detail.)

The market for whiteness

Such contamination is especially dangerous in markets designed to work as Keynesian beauty contests, without any direct causal connection to the underlying signal—for example, a blockchain dispute-resolution contract like Kleros.

These are agreement markets: they reward players who agree with other players, and punish those who disagree. Every player’s incentive is to always be in the majority.

The KBC design assumes that the only rule that can coordinate the players is the rule of truth—that everyone’s opinion equals universal, objective truth plus individual, random noise. But there are infinite alternative coordination rules. (This issue also plagues proof-of-stake, or “POS,” blockchains.)

For example, imagine if Kleros were taken over by white supremacists, whose rule of judgment was simple: decide every case in favor of the whitest side. Once this Kleros Klan got in the saddle, every judge whose criterion was truth, not racism, would lose money on every case where white was not actually in the right. Soon these honest judges would be driven bankrupt and drop out—making Kleros a straight-up klavern. (Who would then fall out amongst themselves about the technicalities of whiteness.)

Pure agreement markets are rare. Usually there is a more concrete causal connection from the fundamentals of a market to its price signal. What this means for any market coordination is that this coordination is, at some fundamental level, unprofitable. It is trading with a suboptimal strategy.

But that it is unprofitable only means that players with an ulterior motive must incur a cost, in some fundamental sense, to achieve that ulterior motive. Maybe that cost is worth it. It is possible that the market can drain their wallets dry before they get what they want; it is also possible that the market can’t.

In the GameStop case, the ulterior motive is a short squeeze. What is a short squeeze, exactly? A short squeeze is actually a very unusual kind of bank run. Its cause is the unsound and unstable, but ubiquitous, bad accounting practice of asset transformation, which inherently produces systemic risk.

The retards (who might be able to stay retarded longer than Citadel can stay solvent) are exploiting a structural instability created by this bad accounting—which is left over from the 19th century. So e. e. musk is right when, in a sort of poem, he writes:

u can’t sell houses u don’t own u can’t sell cars u don’t own but u *can* sell stock u don’t own!? this is bs – shorting is a scam legal only for vestigial reasons

Well, “scam” is a bit much. But the sentiment is basically correct. Let’s work through this interpretation in exquisite proctological (excuse me, praxeological) detail.

The pure bubble

We’ll start by understanding a pure bubble, with no side effects—in a stock that no one is shorting, about whose price no one cares, and whose shares no one is printing.

The basic math of a pure bubble is that, given an arbitrary amount of money, you can pump this stock’s price up to an arbitrary level. However, you cannot get any more money out than you put in.

What you can do is profit by being the first in and first out—but the bubble remains a zero-sum game. The players are just being rearranged. This is why a pure bubble, if intentional, is a scam—a pump-and-dump scheme. For every winner, there is a loser.

Le short squeeze

But if the stock is shorted, now the pure bubble is no longer pure. It has a side effect. That side effect is pain—for the shorts. As Musk, the poet, writes:

Here come the shorty apologists Give them no respect Get Shorty

Shorty can relieve his pain (but not his losses, which are lost forever) instantly—by buying. And hence driving up the bubble—which is no longer zero-sum.

This is a game of musical chairs. Technically, it can go up forever—especially when there are two and a half times as many butts as seats.

It’s important to also note that the people with the butts are not really that rich, in an accounting sense. These funds, banks, etc, do have zillions of dollars of assets—and just slightly fewer zillions of dollars of debt.

This difference, which is smaller than you think, is how much money they actually have (their “capital”). The usual ratio of their capital to their assets (their “leverage”) is set at a level that makes the YOLO margin options daredevils of r/wsb look like Julianne Moore in Safe. “They put derivatives in everything these days.”

And this is safe—since all conceivable failure scenarios have been simulated by the risk management team, all ex-physics professors whose PhD work involved not just finding the Higgs Boson, but actually fucking it—guys who, aged 11, didn’t just win the International Math Olympiad, but had their jersey retired—sir, the guys have run the numbers. Twice. And there’s no way this can happen. You can head home now, sir.

But none of their fancy models accounted for a bunch of Reddit retards… can’t you almost see the movie?

What’s actually happening here? Let’s delve into the proctology—I mean, praxeology. Basically, bank runs happen because people think statistically, not praxeologically. People think statistically, not praxeologically, because that’s what the law requires.

A bank run on the gamer shop

What is a short, anyway? Who is this mysterious… Shorty? What are his nefarious activities? Are they legal? 100%. Are they a scam—as Space Admiral Musk asserts? Well… it’s complicated.

Shorting really is a kind of counterfeiting—honest counterfeiting. To short GameStop, you literally just print your own GameStop share. You put your name on it, of course. And what do you do with this fake share? Sell it, of course. What else would you do?

The counterfeit share is a promise, made not by GameStop but by you, that whatever benefits a real GameStop share confers (dividends, free Xbox games, raffle tickets, etc), your fake one will provide as well. Obviously, you owe whatever this promise is worth. The money you made by selling it (selling a promise is what “borrowing” is) is yours.

Musk is right to refer to this as a “vestigial practice.” The truly vestigial practice is not the fabrication of these counterfeit shares—but the old “paper belt” financial systems which treat these two very different securities, the real GameStop share and the fake one, as the same thing.

It’s true that they promise exactly the same returns; but the promises are made by different people (“counterparties”). These are different financial instruments—because they have different risk structures. They also confer different rights—a fake share has no shareholder vote. Mixing them together is just a 19th-century programming error.

Obviously this mistake is obvious—so it has a patch. The promise that is a short is your promise, but it is secured by a central clearinghouse. Through your broker, this clearinghouse watches your capital, makes sure you can always pay off your promises by selling assets, and if you can’t sells them for you.

In theory the clearinghouse can’t fail. In practice maybe it can—if it gets in the way of the wrong flash crash, which is the actual reason brokers turned off GameStop trading on Thursday. A flash crash is a chain reaction of automatic selling—which can happen at arbitrarily high speed, making margin accounts insolvent before margin calls fill. (A flash crash is also a concern for stablecoins built on asset transformation—see below.)

If the clearinghouse did fail, and instead of a real GameStop share you held a piece of paper signed by (a) some dude, and (b) what used to be a clearinghouse but got torched and is now a crackhouse, you really are SOL. (Pro tip: you can usually ask your broker to hold only real shares, not laminated promises. Call and tell them not to let your shares be “borrowed.”)

But in practice, America is the stock market. Which means anyone who is useless to the stock market is useless to America. (And has probably gotten that message, too.) Which means your laminated promises are actually safe, because the clearinghouses are too big to fail and will be bailed out.

Which also means that they are de facto government agencies. But we don’t feel any urgent need to admit that. Increasingly, the 21st-century consensus of government looks like it is coming into view: pseudolibertarianism.

Pseudolibertarianism is nominally libertarian and polycentric, but actually statist and monocentric—mating the empathy of capitalism with the efficiency of socialism. This worst-of-both-worlds dystopia flourishes by uniting the worst people from both sides.

Synthetic assets are good, actually

Again, the fundamental problem here is bad accounting.

The value of the promise is fundamentally lower than the value of the share, because the risk of the promise can never be zero—especially since the final policy in the stack of insurance policies that purports to fill the gap is an informal government promise—the clearinghouse is “too big to fail,” whatever that means. On such pillars rest our roofs.

Any financial system dependent on informal securities must be in some sense vestigial. At least, no one would design any such thing. Even if there is no way to fix a system, it is often useful to know how it would be designed if it could be designed from scratch.

The default path for fixing a system is to rationalize and formalize current practices. If we eliminated the risk gap by fully nationalizing the market, broker and clearinghouse, your synthetic laminated promise would truly be as good as a real share—and synthetic shares could be injected ad libitum into the market for real shares.

The description I gave above, which is of what some call naked shorting, has already gone halfway there—well past reality. While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with naked shorting, it is not looked upon well by securities law—but it’s also treated like driving 70 in a 55 zone. If anything is vestigial, this “gray area” BS is vestigial.

In reality, there is a gnarly system of “borrowing” shares which often breaks down and makes shares “hard to borrow.” Islamic banking uses similar rickety constructions to pretend it doesn’t have interest rates. (Western banking is closer to Allah every year—indeed Japan has long been fully halal. Though Allah’s view on negative interest rates is not clear—is there some hadith?)

Far from destabilizing the market, unlimited safe and healthy naked shorting would stabilize it—because if Wall Street can go “all in” against Reddit, Wall Street walks all over the tards. Wall Street knows that GameStop will not be trading above $30 in six months, or maybe even six hours—so there is a huge amount of money to be made.

But to make this money, you have to have perfect timing, balls of steel and a bankroll the size of God. Wall Street has only two of these things—but Reddit has the other. That’s why the battle is fun. If Wall Street knew that Wall Street could go all in with unlimited synthetic shorts, they would drive GameStop back to $15 in 45 seconds.

But because of this funky “borrowing” infrastructure, which is, like, something that feels like it was invented by Jesse Livermore in 1927—or possibly John Law in 1727—I complain about old operating systems because they date to 1972—Wall Street cannot project that Wall Street will put on unbounded shorts. So it cannot model its risk. Wall Street does not have balls of steel. Wall Street has risk-management departments.

There are individual financiers who have balls of steel. Probably at least half of them have gone full Coriolanus, and joined the retard mob. It is often wise to obey random coordination signals—that’s why the battle is fun.

Synthetic assets are bad, actually

The fundamental cause of the instability is that you shouldn’t be transforming demand for one asset into demand for a qualitatively different asset. Here, demand from what should be the prediction market for the future price of $GME is hemorrhaging spaghetti, driven by a savage positive-feedback loop, into what should be the market for savers to stake their retirements on a chain of videogame stores.

In theory, when you add artificial demand or supply to a market whose price is driven by fundamentals, and this artificial demand or supply creates an artificial mispricing, this mispricing should attract speculators who expect to profit from it. In practice, many forms of market failure can sufficiently daunt this army of market vigilantes, these bold knights of the capital-asset pricing model—till they lose the will to fight, and their citadel is stormed by a braying mob of horny, retarded, revolting peasants.

All forms of asset transformation create structural instability, because all forms of asset transformation create automatic buying and/or selling. As Wall Street first discovered in 1987, automatic trading is to flash crashes as buffer overflows are to getting your website hacked.

The stablecoin catastrophe

For a pure example, consider a crude “stablecoin” which turns a supply of Ethereum into a supply of digital dollars. The dollar hodlers demand dollars, not ether. But they can collateralize virtual dollars with a stockpile of Ethereum, thereby transforming their actual demand for dollars into spurious demand for Ethereum.

The virtual dollars are safe because they are collateralized by more than their value of Ethereum. But value is just price. If the price of Ethereum drops, the contract has to sell Ethereum for dollars, preserving the peg.

This works until a significant amount of demand for Ethereum is actually transformed demand for dollars—spurious demand. At this point we see the potential for a feedback loop which creates a self-sustaining avalanche of Ethereum sales—a flash crash.

Since selling into this avalanche is essentially impossible, and since Ethereum’s price is a Keynesian beauty contest anyway, it can crash to arbitrarily low levels. Fortunately, if only because Bitcoin is ancient and retarded, Bitcoin is immune to this instability.

Takeaway for market designers

Speculators are good because they predict the future price curve of a security. But they should speculate as if speculating in a prediction market for rainfall in Spain—betting against all other speculators, to predict a signal that no one can predict perfectly, and no one can affect at all.

Speculation should not directly inject supply or demand into primary asset markets. The collective opinion of the speculative prediction market should only have indirect effects—effects mediated by humans who respond to the signal this market produces.

If the prediction market has a direct effect on the primary market, it is as if the clouds in Spain cared how much rain the Spaniards in the plain expected them to contain. If the clouds were that smart, who could predict the weather? It would be chaos. Chaos is exactly what I see when I look out the window.

In theory, in the long run, traders in the primary market should be able to ride out these speculative oscillations—and even profit from them. Why should they have to? The size of these rogue waves, though a function of leverage, is not even predictable. The goal of a market designer is to not have chaos.

Speculation should be a zero-sum game whose only side effects are: (a) redistributing dollars between winning and losing speculators; (b) producing interesting predictions about the future. Speculation should never directly cause anything.

How the battle ends

People often mistake me for some kind of rich and/or powerful person. I am neither! Why would I be out here grifting for my supper on Substack? Do you know how shitty it is to be even a tiny bit famous? But in a past life, I was once a CEO, unbigly and very reluctantly. I know what a share is, and a board. I have even passed a resolution or two. And I know the GameStop C-suite is shitting bricks the size of Stonehenge.

In theory, it is entirely up to them to stop this—and they can even stop it in a copacetic way. The GameStop management has every legal right to print GameStop shares and sell them. They have every financial incentive to print GameStop shares and sell them. The retards can stay retarded longer than the hedgies can stay solvent—but no one can be more retarded than a printer. I hear it goes brrr.

And yet—why should they let all the hedgies off the hook at once? Why not drip out a few shares at a time, for a price as sweet as gold? At least in theory, the management is aligned with its new barbarian shareholders—bad as their manners may be. Both have a logical incentive to feast long and slowly on the unlimited, Lloyds-like liabilities of the trapped fund bros. Remember when Frodo got strung up in a cave by that big spider?

As Matt Levine notes, this is a legal and regulatory mess. Hence, Stonehenge. In some ways, “Gamergate 2: Financial BGL” is like covid, a genuine libertarian moment. In a libertarian world we would all long since have been vaccinated. In a libertarian world, the masters of the universe would all long since have put these retards in their place.

The world is as it is—with what result, we see. It did not end well for Coriolanus. And who, observing these events, does not hear the voice of the Big Lebowski echoing in his head? “Lebowski! The bums will always lose. The bums will always lose, Lebowski!” And yet—whose side are you on?

How it should actually work

Here is a weird policy opinion I have that probably nobody else has. I feel that a well- designed market should separate primary and secondary demand. Here is how this financial utopia of mine would work. I am just an Internet rando so forget I said this.

There would be one asset market A which set the price of all securities through unlevered, untransformed demand, from actual savers, for instruments of saving. There would be another prediction market B which predicted the future price of securities, by matching purely speculative long and short bets—without market making, delta hedging, or any other source of mechanical liquidity.

These markets would be as separated as possible. This is hard. But the goal is to prevent feedback loops from the prediction market backward to the asset market. Information can still feed back—asset investors can see the future price path that the consensus of speculators currently predicts—but demand should not feed back.

Under the current design, speculators can drive all kinds of savage leveraged feedback into the asset-price signal. A short squeeze is just this kind of feedback. In a Hayekian signaling sense, grotty feedback does not improve the efficiency of market calculation. Feedback is just noise—and with all due respect to libertarians, noise is disorder. And suppressing disorder is the basic task of even a libertarian government, isn’t it?

The purpose of a market is to produce an accurate price signal. Separating these two markets, if possible, eliminates speculative feedback and improves the fidelity of the signal. But how can two markets be separated?

Here is one design which, though too hilarious to be serious, illustrates the solution: divide players into two groups, by the first letter of their surnames. The A-M players can play only in the asset market; the N-Z players, only in the prediction market. So no one can hedge a prediction by buying an asset—a process that contaminates both markets with completely spurious, mechanical supply and demand. This alphabetic separation is obviously retarded. But there is probably a non-retarded way to get the same result.

Where the mob will go next

Obviously, a mob is a wild, reasonless animal. Philosophy cannot predict it, any more than philosophy can predict a wolverine. All we can do with our logical faculties is to calculate where the wolverine should go—if by some chance it is a rational wolverine.

The essential problem with the Reddit Retard Revolution is that it has no exit strategy. While it is aiming at a real instability, this instability is not a revolutionary instability, but a dead end.

The $GME price has only one stable equilibrium: the normie equilibrium (which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel). It cannot come to rest anywhere but earth.

Therefore at a certain point it will return there—and in that degringolade, it will be every retard for himself and the devil take the hindmost. The revolution, in short, is doomed to turn on itself. Brother will knife brother. Armez-vous, retards!

So GameStop is not a retarded rerun of 1917. It’s more like: a retarded rerun of 1905. But maybe 1917 couldn’t have happened without 1905. If the wolverine was thinking logically (this is not necessarily how to think about a KBC—especially not when the other judges are retarded)—what would Lenin do? Lenin would look for two things.

First, because say what you want about Lenin but dude was a winner, he would look for a second equilibrium—in which whatever stonk the retards sent up could stay up. Rather than just kicking the market into an interregnum of chaos, a pirate looting frenzy in which the weak are skinned and the strong exalted as heroes, until the dream collapses and the old regime returns, would inaugurate a new financial order. Rather than sacking the Capital, Lenin would take the Capital—and rule from it. Do you… feel in charge?

Second, because Lenin was just as lazy and mean as any retard, he would look for a huge buffalo herd of structurally trapped shorts. We’re no Bolsheviks here, but good Americans—but no sport is more American than surrounding a huge herd of buffalo, shrieking like rabid apes till they stampede over a cliff, then grilling the tendies.

A second equilibrium

A second equilibrium is a monetary equilibrium.

The only way a stonk, or a piece of paper, or a little chip of metal, or anything, can go up and not come down, is if it turns at least partly into money: a medium of saving, or store of value.

The only way for everyone not just to see their tendies as green numbers on a screen, as badges, as catch-and-release tendies before the inevitable rout, but for everyone to take them home and enjoy them permanently, is monetization: turning a normal good, valuable or even worthless, into a standard currency which is conventionally used to transport purchasing power across time.

Such a currency is inherently overvalued—just like $GME. But unlike $GME, it goes up and stays up. Why? Did you know that women, if someone tells them you’ve never read Carl Menger’s On The Origins of Money, look at you funny—like a piece of bad cheese?

I have written enough about monetary equilibria and monetization/remonetization over the years, so I thought I’d just link to the first piece I wrote on the subject, way back in 2005. This was the first essay, besides blog comments (and, in the early 90s, Usenet), I ever put on the Web. (The intro was so cringe that I let my mysterious literary executor rewrite it.) I do still believe pretty much all of it.

In 2005, I really had no way to know that our hyper-rational financial system would not instantly hyper-organize itself around these new principles. Actually it took 15 years; Bitcoin (if Satoshi is who a lot of people think he is—he was on my blogroll in 2007); and r/wsb. And it’s only just started! (And the principles aren’t really new, just a very trivial extension of Austrian economics.)

And if, like Matt Levine, you have questions like

If pure collective will can create a valuable financial asset, without any reference to cash flows or fundamentals, then all you need is a collective and some will. Just hop on Reddit and create value out of nothing. If it works for Bitcoin, why not … anything? Why not Dogecoin? Why not Signal Advance? Tesla Inc.? GameStop?

All the principles you need to know are behind that link. Let’s take Doge, for instance. Is it monetizable? Kind of but not really.

Doge is more monetizable than GameStop, which is totally unmonetizable because (a) it is not categorically unique, (b) there is another valuation model for it, and (c) most important, there is an authority that can print an infinite amount.

Doge has only the first problem. Although a shitcoin with a long and storied history, and the original memecoin, it is an also-ran even in the altcoin space. In the end, there can be only one stable monetary equilibrium—one stably-overvalued good—and it will be Bitcoin or Ethereum if it’s a crypto, gold or silver if it’s a metal, and the dollar, euro or yuan if it’s paper. In an iterated Keynesian beauty contest, the leader tends to win.

Moreover, Doge for some stupid meme reason has a design error: a 5% annual dilution rate. The way to think about dilution is to think in terms of normalized accounting—in which your position in a token is defined as a fraction of all tokens outstanding.

In this model, which is obviously correct, owning Doge is like putting your money in a bank which steals 5% of it a year—to give to randos—because “deflation is bad.” No, retard, actually deflation is good—it means your money isn’t just holding its value, but actually going up. I like money!

The weird, semi-shady, non-decentralized pseudo-crypto XRP has done much better than it deserves, because of its 0% dilution rate. I genuinely think you can’t understand this issue correctly unless you are literally retarded—or at least, know how to fake it.

The 5% thing is fatal. Even with the rocket fuel of the retards, it’ll be hard for a horse this weak to come back from this far back in the pack. I’m not sure how anyone could fail to enjoy chanting “DOGE DOGE DOGE,” but I don’t think it’s enough. And of course—basically no one is shorting Doge. So no buffalo, which bounds thy tendies.

The mighty buffalo

At this point our wolverine eye cannot help but turn to precious metals. My precious! No one can doubt but that these goods are monetizable—the word for “money” in every other language on the planet means either “gold” or “silver.” I like gold. I like silver, too!

But the question is: where’s Shorty? Are there any shorts? As a wolverine, you have no choice but to go where the buffalo roam. Who is shorting gold or silver? Well…

If you want to investigate the existence and accounting structure of synthetic precious metals, aka “paper gold,” good luck. My advice would be to start small and simple. First—just for practice—figure out the JFK assassination.

Once you really understand that, you might have some chance of analyzing the gold-derivatives market. Suffice it to say that according to BIS statistics, today’s market has about $900 billion in outstanding gold derivatives—more or less, laminated promises of gold—and $80 billion in silver derivatives. That’s about 15,000 tons of paper gold—three times as much as Fort Knox—and about 90,000 tons of silver.

That’s… a lot of buffalo. Now, as always, the essential question is: who made all these promises? And what do they have to back them up?

Part of this includes the “hedge book,” or the forward promises of future gold made by gold miners. That’s about 300 tons today—so we’re off by a factor of about 50. Okay… some of it must be offsetting; what you really want is the consolidated net liabilities of all bullion banks… really. Just start with JFK.

Also, while these forward sales represent real gold “in the ground,” it’s still in the ground. You can’t exactly deliver ten tons of ore in a hole in Ghana to the COMEX. So… we’re looking at roughly… on the order of… a trillion dollars of buffalo meat. Okay. Is there such a thing as too many tendies? I think there might actually be.

The thing is that it’s very easy to make fake precious metals, at least on paper. They don’t pay any dividends and no one uses them for anything. Probably no one will ever come back with that piece of paper and ask for a hunk of metal. Who would do that? Some retard?

What’s interesting is that silver, although inferior by all standards as a precious metal—silver is really the Ethereum of precious metals—has a special quality: it is financed like a precious metal, but used as an industrial metal.

As a result, total stocks of silver by value are much lower than stocks of gold—since physical silver is rarely used to store wealth, whereas physical gold often still is. So the ratio of paper silver to physical silver is also much lower. So if you put a lighter under the paper-silver market—that metal, though an inferior currency, “catches” faster.

The precious-metals markets are connected to the stonk market through ETFs. The major ETFs are SLV and GLD. Contrary to popular belief, they hold real metal bars (though there is nothing wrong with the closed-end Sprott equivalents, PSLV/PHYS).

The way these ETFs work is that if their price rises above the spot metal price, which is set by the aforementioned paper-silver market, their “authorized participants” (big banks) can profit by buying metal and exchanging it for ETF shares. They like money, so they tend to do this. Same in reverse, of course, when the ETF goes down.

The result is that if the market drives the ETF price up above the spot price, it creates a giant sucking sound which wants to find all the metal in the world and suck it into the ETF. Only real metal will do—not promises to mine some hole in Ghana in 2025. I’m sure it’s a very nice hole, but… this is of course a maturity-transformation collapse.

So anyone with a claim to metal, because that kind of a person probably likes money, wants to turn it in for actual metal that they can give to the ETF. But, assuming our JFK analysis is accurate and there are more claims than actual metal—we’re back to the ol’ game of musical chairs. With a lot of butts, and not all that many seats. I think.

Moreover—in the lives of those now living—this has happened. In silver. It was in 1980, so it wasn’t decentralized. And there was no ETF. It was literally a conspiracy of three people to coordinate (corner) the silver market.

They succeeded, but they were using too much leverage—so they literally had paper hands, and it was easy to break them. Using leverage (borrowing money to buy stonks) in a coordination attempt is like that scene from The Wire where Stringer Bell asks his class if they’re “taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.”

The powers that be can easily break your corner by pulling your leverage—and why wouldn’t they? Historically, they always do. It’s very legal and very cool. Why wouldn’t they do it to you? Asking for a friend.

The current market capitalization of GameStop would buy about a third of the world’s silver stockpile—and more like 1/250 of the world’s gold stockpile. While this makes gold a better, stabler currency, it makes silver easier for any retard or retards unknown to squeeze—or so I think.

That’s why I just bought a little silver. Not investment advice—merely full disclosure. Probably fuck-all will happen. But it’s still silver. I like this metal.

A much more open and general run

Some eggheads interpret GameStop as a political event. Nor are they wrong. There is an remarkable analogy from almost 200 years ago—Francis Place, and his “To Stop The Duke, Go For Gold” campaign, in 1832’s wild Days of May.

As Place himself wrote in a letter:

It was very clearly seen that if a much more open and general run for gold upon the banks, the bankers and the Bank of England could be produced, that the embarrassment of the Court and the Duke would be increased, and that if a general panic could be produced the Duke would be at once defeated. To this purpose the attention of us all was turned, and many propositions were made to increase the demand for gold.

There was a general conviction that if the Duke succeeded in forming an administration, that circumstance alone would produce a general panic, and almost instantaneously close all the banks, put a stop to the circulation of Bank of England notes and compel that Bank to close its doors, and then at once produce a revolution.

While the discussion was going on some one said, we ought to have a placard, announcing the consequences of permitting the Duke to form an administration and attempting to govern the country, to call upon the people to take care of themselves by collecting all the hard money they could and keeping it, by drawing it from Savings Banks, from Bankers, and from the Bank of England. This was caught at, and Mr Parkes set himself to work to draw up a Placard, among the words he wrote were these,—we must stop the Duke—These words struck me as containing nearly the whole that was necessary to be said, I therefore took a large sheet of paper and wrote thus.

To Stop The Duke Go For Gold.

I held up the paper and all at once said, that will do—no more words are necessary. Money was put upon the table and in less than four hours, the bill stickers were at work posting the bills.

The Bank of England was a fractional-reserve bank whose notes were denominated in, and redeemable for, gold. It had suspended redemption during the Napoleonic wars, then brought it back after the Corsican ogre was vanquished. Everyone had the right to redeem any note for gold, but of course hardly anyone ever did. Same old story.

Place, a Chartist—basically a sort of Jane Austen communist—wanted to bully the Duke of Wellington into letting the Tory House of Lords approve the Reform Act 1832, the first great step in the decline of the British gentry. His idea was to organize the whole lower-middle-class population into a sort of subreddit, and get them to buy $GLD. This would of course mean a run on the Bank of England. Which would wreck the British financial system and cause a revolution. Which would be good for the working man.

And it worked. Not that there was a run—that the “Iron Duke” caved. To this retard. Maybe that was the beginning of the end. In any case, if you’ve learned anything here, at least you’ve learned that 1832 was lit.

Cohesion, commitment and nihilism

From a political or even historical perspective, though, the financial nature of the collective action is not the most important fact about the Retard Revolution. What seems more important is its ironic nature.

In the age of democracy, long before any of us was born—perhaps it is best defined as the age of Francis Place—collective action was inherently sincere. There was nothing even slightly ironic about a Chartist handbill.

A couple hundred years later, the same rainy island emitted a sci-fi TV show in which voters elect a cartoon character. Not everything in Black Mirror will happen. This will.

The ironic approach to democracy uses the same mechanisms, but plays by completely different rules. The normal state of the ironic voter is a state of nihilism; he believes in nothing; he is happy to do anything, “for the lulz.” The idea of sincere and instinctive collective spirit, Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya, is one he finds hilarious and/or horrifying.

Yet he is a human being and a human being is a social animal. He will cohere—he will act in concert with his fellow human beings—and he will enjoy it. But as a modern and cosmopolitan human, he can do so only ironically—as a game.

This is cohesion without commitment. To persuade an army of retards to all buy stock in the same company, it is not even necessary to persuade them to believe in the company.

They understand and believe in their collective action; but this collective action is not a mass projection of an individual action they believe in. It is a collective strategy made from individual actions which are individually ridiculous—but collectively effective.

Normally, cohesion and commitment go together. But we expect cohesion to be the effect of commitment—you obey your officers loyally because of your passionate loyalty to your country. Here, commitment is the effect of cohesion—anyone who hodls side by side with you is your brother, regardless of the stonk.

The capacity for significant collective ironic action is very rare in human history—so rare that I am at a loss to think of another example. It must have happened. Irony is not a new invention—but its distribution across a whole population is unprecedented. Of course, this same population has lost all its capacity for collective sincere action.

Perhaps this is the broad political-science lesson of GameStop: that although politics is the organization of mass human action, the alignment of mass action on the basis of sincere commitment is a phenomenon of the past, designed for the population of the past—a population that now seems unimaginably simple, sincere, and responsible.

But the gamification of mass action on the basis of ironic cohesion is the phenomenon of the future—designed for a population which is only becoming more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and frivolous. I can’t wait till we start doing this with actual elections: nihilistic, gamified voting. Just like that TV show.

Party update

I have good news and bad news. The good news is: January saw strong 30% month-over-month growth—enabling me to buy my children, who are hungry, some tendies. The bad news is: the normies are even stronger.

Retards and gentlemen, we have slipped from #16 to #18 on the Substack politics chart. I anticipated this! I did! Still, it comes as a shock…

So—if you like this kind of shit—well, here’s one way to send a collective message:

[joylee56]

Have You Tried Turning It On and Off?

For Ifishouldvanish; Happy RCIJ!

for the prompt ‘Hey, you’re the jerk...’

Rating: Explicit; Also Lacey has a potty mouth.

“I’m pretty sure nurse maid isn’t part of my job description.”  Lacey said.  

“You’re the project manager.  Babysitting is pretty much what project managers do.”

(Part 1 of 3)

The data center was dark.

“Crap!”  Lacey flipped the light switch again.  Nothing.  Not a blinking light to be seen.    

Using her phone for light she crawled along the floor to locate the surge protector/uninterruptible power supply.  Which clearly had not lived up to it’s name.

Except everything had been unplugged from the uninterruptible power supply and there were now extension cords run from the mains.  “Fuck!”

This despite the half dozen signs she had posted specifically telling people not to do that.  Their equipment was flaky enough as it was.  It could not take power fluctuations.

They’d caught the edge of a hurricane starting Friday.  It had been storming like a bastard the whole weekend.  God only knew when the circuit breaker had gone out.  Except it was a certainty that it was after some idiot had disconnected the surge protector.  She pulled all the plugs. Making a complete sweep of the room to make sure she had gotten them all.

Then she headed for the main switch box.

“Circuit breaker out again?”  LeFou, their database administrator, commented.  “I already had to fix that once this weekend.  You really need to do something about that.  Gaston has enough on his plate without having to worry about unreliable hardware.”

“What did you do?” Lacey demanded.

“When I came in on Saturday morning the storm had tripped the circuit breaker.  So I turned it back on.”  LeFou looked very pleased with himself.  “When that didn’t get the system back up and running I figured out that the surge protector you had everything plugged wasn’t working.  So I found some extension cords, all with built in surge protectors as you can see, and plugged everything in to the wall sockets.  Once that was done the whole system booted up like a charm.”

Words failed her. As she headed back to the data center, LeFou called after her.  “You really make too big a deal out of your job, Lacey.  It’s mostly just common sense.”

Which was clearly in short supply around Megacorp if nobody had thought to stop that idiot from putting their entire rickety old system at risk.  But it was not like bitching about him to the head of IT would do any good.  LeFou was an old buddy of Gaston’s, which was how he had gotten his job.

It was also how she had gotten her job.  She had already been living with Gaston when he offered her the position as project manager, so it was not like the sex had been a quid pro quo, despite what the gossip said.  And she had worked damn hard since she got hired to learn how to do the job properly.  Hell, she was doing most of Gaston’s work these days.

But this was way beyond her ability to fix.  And Gaston’s fancy computer science degree that had been long on theory and short on the practical.  Not to mention she strongly suspected that his gentleman Cs had been earned more on the football field than in the classroom.  He would be even less use.  At least she had some self taught hardware knowledge.

Gaston was also halfway to Burlington to attend some regional company meeting.  She texted him, with a brief summary and telling him she would be calling in outside help.  

A Google search on her phone showed there was only one computer repair company within an hour’s drive that said they worked on servers.

Crossing her fingers, Lacey called them.

“Golden Hat, our work is as good as gold.”

Praying their tech guys were better than their marketing people, she quickly explained the problem.  “Can you get someone here to fix it now?”

“As it happens Mr. Gold is available.  What system are you running?”

“Windows Server 2003”

“You’ve got to be kid…, that is, let me check with Mr. Gold.”

He forgot to actually put her call on hold so she heard him call out,  “Rum, you think you remember how to work on WS 2003?”

Another voice came from farther away,  “I remember.  Why would ye want me to?”

The guy she had been talking to came back.  “He’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

She spent the time waiting for him sending out an email explaining what had happened. She also printed out actual paper notices which she posted in the coffee room as well as the data center.  

At least the guy who showed up was the right vintage to work on the equipment.  A tiny little guy, probably only a few inches taller than her in her heels, he had graying brown hair past his collar, but an old fashioned air which was not completely due to the dress slacks, tailored white shirt and dark tie, with a name tag on his blazer reading ‘Mr. Gold, Golden Hat Computing’.

Clearly he was an old school computer nerd.  But the laptop he carried was state of the art and his backpack of tools looked reassuringly full.  

Noticing he used a cane she asked,  “The data center is downstairs.  Is that going to be a problem.”

“Shouldn’t be.” He told her brusquely.  “Now what happened?  Storm knock out your system?”

“That’s the least of it.”  She sighed.

By the time she laid out the chain of events they were in the data center and he was taking a good look around.  “How often do you overwrite your back up tapes?”

“We got two that alternate every other night at midnight.”

He winced.  “You’re not even set up to use a RAID?”

Which was Lacey’s turn to wince.  “The company backs up it’s data to the Home Office every twenty four hours and so with the tape back up on site my boss didn’t think we needed to spend the money to upgrade.”

“That’s not the only reason to use a RAID.”  He shook his head.  “Let me run some diagnostics and see how much of this is salvageable.  These aren’t hot swapable so pulling the drives is going to be slow.”

“So I need to tell everyone they’re not going to be able to access their data this morning?”  This was not going to be a fun morning.”

“If you get lucky it will take a couple of days to get things up and running.  Uhm, don’t expect to get lucky.  This stuff is old enough I’m no hopeful.”  Looking around he added.  “I could build you a new system in less time than that if you’re not dead set on Windows.”

“It has to talk to the Home Office.”

He shrugged and started opening up the first server.

She left him to it.

Despite her email and signs half of the office came up to her and demanded why the system was down and what was she doing to fix it.  

Mr. Gold appeared shortly before lunch.  He had a clip board out and was making a lot of notes on it.

That was fast.  “You fixed it?”  

“Uhm, no.  You’ve got several disk drives that are dead, but all of them are reading as threshold exceeded and are on the verge of failure.  I’m amazed the whole system didn’t die on you years ago.  I’ll need to order new drives and you might as well replace them all.

“After we get you new drives, we’ll need to run a complete set of diagnostics on both the hardware and the data.  I’m not optimistic about your backups, so you probably should see if your headquarters can get you the data you need.”

He finished writing something and tore the top sheet off the form he had been writing on. He glanced up briefly to meet her eyes as he handed it to her then looked away.  “That’s my proposal and cost estimate.  I’ll need it signed, uhm by someone authorized to approve that large an expenditure.

“And, uhm...” His voice got softer,  “We’ll need half down before I do the work.”

“Half?” Squeezing half of this cost estimate out of corporate was going to take a lot longer than they could afford to have the data center down.  She smiled her sexiest smile at the guy.  “Can’t you get started right away?  It’s not like Megacorp isn’t good for it. And I’d be ever so appreciative.”

She figured she would not have to go further in her ‘appreciation’ than having drinks with this guy.  After almost a year at Megacorp she could read a nerd at twenty meters and this was one of the shy ones.  He probably would not even try for a good night kiss.  

“No.”  He glanced up briefly to meet her eyes and then back down to fidget with his pen.  “Megacorp takes 90 days to pay their invoices.  And that’s if they don’t try to dispute the bill.  We’re a small company.  We can’t carry accounts receivables that long.  Half down.”

A shy one with a back bone it seemed.  And he knew just how cheeseparing corporate Accounts Payable was.  She sighed and pulled up the spreadsheet where she recorded the petty cash account.  “How much can I get done for 1497 bucks?”

“I can get you new hard drives installed and a proper uninterruptible power source hooked up.”  He shook his head.  “What you’ve got down there is a piece a… that is, it’s completely inadequate for what you’re running.  By rights you need a stand by generator as a back up.”

“So, I keep telling them.”  In detail.  She had a whole proposal written up about what they needed to upgrade and how a new system would pay for itself in costs savings.  She had gone over Gaston’s head and forwarded it to corporate.  Where she strongly suspected it was sitting unread in somebody’s inbox.

Gaston never did make it back to the office from Burlington.  Leaving her to take the flak from everyone else about the system being down.  She was nursing the bottom half of a bottle of wine when he made it home.

From what had apparently been a golf game with the Regional VP in charge of tech. She came close to heaving the bottle of wine at him when he asked what was for dinner.

“Whatever you can find in the fridge.  And while you’re fixing it we need to talk about how we’re going to get the data center running again.”

At least he had apparently read her texts so was up to date on the issues.  He read through Golden Hat’s proposal and cost estimate while he ate his sandwich.  He was frowning by the time he finished them.  

“We don’t have the money for this, Lacey.”  Gaston shook his head.  “Corporate is breathing down our necks.  They’re going to be combining divisions to cut costs.  We need to show a higher profit or we’ll end up merged with Vermont.  And they’ll only need one IT department.”

“We don’t have a choice, Gaston.  The thing’s not going to fix itself.”  She nibbled the sandwich he had the grace to make for her while he was making his own.

“Maybe you could, you know, flirt with him a little?”  

“You’re so desperate you’re willing to pimp me out?”  Clearly the time had come to re-evaluate her relationship with Gaston.  She let him sputter about how it was not like that for a minute before she told him.  “I tried.  He’s a hard headed Scotsman.  Not the ‘Capt, the engines canna take it’ kind,   although since he fixes computers I guess he’s that kind too.  But a full on Trainspotting gives no fucks kind.”

Mr. Gold came back the next day to replace the drives and set up a new uninterruptible power supply.  When he was done Gaston cornered him and in his best buddy to buddy manner tried to talk him into completing the job.  “… it’s the bureaucracy, you see.  It’s not that you won’t get paid.”

Out of petty cash over the next two years if Gaston was not going to send the bill on to corporate Lacey figured.

But Mr. Gold was having none of it.  “As I told your… Assistant?”

“Project manager.” Lacey corrected him.

“Uhm, right.” He sounded dubious.  “You could upgrade to a Linux system at a lot less than it will take you to fix this one.  And you’d have something that was actually being supported with updates.”  

At that point Gaston gave up on friendly and tried for intimidation.  “Look if you don’t fix this you’ll never work for Megacorp again and I’ll let everybody in the industry now how lousy your service was.  It’ll ruin you.

Mr. Gold was staring at his shoes and the fingers of his right hand were rubbing together in a circular motion.  His voice was quiet, but firm.  “Not working for a company that’s no going to pay me and makes impossible demands will be no great loss.”

He glance up at Gaston looming over him and backed up a step before continuing.  “And I’ve been in the business since before you could read.  Besides being the only service and repair company this side of Bangor.  I’m thinkin’ you’re over-estimating your influence a bit.”

Probably a by a lot, Lacey had to agree.

Gaston fell back on what was plan C.  “At least reinstall the back up for us.  That won’t take you long and we can pay you for it today.”

With what?  Lacey wondered.  They had already used all the petty cash.

“You can’t just reload your backups.”  Mr. Gold told him.  “You need to review the data to see how much has been corrupted.  There’s a strong likelihood that your backups got overwritten after the first crash and if so they’re almost certainly corrupted.  Reconstructing your data is about half of my bid.”

“But you don’t know for certain the tapes are corrupted?”  Gaston insisted.

“I’m sure enough of it that I’m not willing to reload that backup onto a clean system without a thorough review.”  Mr. Gold told him.

“If you won’t do it we’ll get someone else.”  Gaston threatened.

“You’ll have to because I’ll no do it.”  Gold started to pack up his gear.  “I’d recommend going with the Nerd Herd at the Buy More over in Bangor. They’re competent and I’m pretty sure at least one of them is old enough to drink and so may have worked on WS 2003 at least once.”    

They did not get the Nerd Herder who was old enough to drink.  But despite Gaston pulling the same intimidation on him as he had on Gold, even he was not willing to reload the backup data.  Although he was not as certain as Gold had seemed that the data was corrupted.  Instead he fell back on squeaking out,  “It’s Buy More policy to check the back up data first,” before running for his little car.  

Lacey spent several hours trying to convince Gaston to bring back Gold.  “The guy clearly knows how our system works, Gaston.  I mean he probably was working on servers back when it was introduced.”

Gaston was still maintaining they could not afford to do that when she finally left in a huff.

Gaston did not come home that night.  Which was probably just as well because Lacey was completely out of patience with the guy.  She did bring him a smoothie by way of a peace offering the next morning.

“The system’s down again.”  LeFou greeted Lacey with before she got her jacket off.

“Damn it!  He said he’d fixed the drives.”  Lacey turned toward the data center.

“It’s not the drives.”  LeFou told her.  “Something happened to the Home Office’s system.  The entire company’s down.”

Lacey had a sinking feeling.  Instead of going to the data center, she headed into Gaston’s office.  He was on the phone with someone, who by the tone of Gaston’s voice was way further up the food chain than he was.

She waited for him to get off the phone and asked,  “What did you do?”

“Don’t you start, Lace.  I just had corporate IT crawling up my butt.”

“You reloaded the backups without having them checked, didn’t you?”  They were in serious shit.

“The guy from the Nerd Herd said they were okay.”

“The guy from the Nerd Herd was maybe all of twenty and you brow beat him into saying they might be okay.” Lacey pointed out.

“Yeah, well, don’t say that to anybody else and we might come out of this with our jobs.”

“Gaston, there is no way in Hell that kid did not go back and tell his boss what you wanted him to do.  And you can be damn sure the boss wrote up a report to cover their asses.  They’re sure to tell corporate as soon as our crash hits the news.”  She checked her phone.  “Which happened about two hours ago.”  

The hit squad they sent from corporate to investigate the ‘incident’ came armed not only with the Nerd Herd’s version of events, but with Golden Hat’s ever so meticulous proposal and cost estimate which she, like a good little corporate shill, had forwarded for approval.  So it did not take them long to figure out where the screw up had been.

It really hit the fan when the hit squad dug up her old proposal pointing out the inadequacies in the system along with how to fix it.  She had worked her butt off preparing that thing and now they were going to screw her with it.

Gaston got axed in the first wave.  They did not outright say it was for incompetence, but anyone with half a brain could read between the lines and figure it out.

They announced the merger of the Maine office with the Vermont one a week later. Everything was going to move to Burlington.  Keeping her job would mean being hours away from Dad which would make taking care of him a problem.  Not moving meant she would be out of work.  Again.

It turned out they did not give her a choice.  “Why am I being fired?”  Lacey demanded of the HR people.

The woman sighed. “You’re not being fired, Ms. French.  We are merging the Maine office with the one in Vermont.  With this merger there will be a downsizing of the IT departments.  Positions within the department will be determined by seniority and qualifications and I’m afraid you are the lowest ranked in both areas.”

“But I’m the one who discovered the cause of the problem and put together the proposal for how to fix it.  Before it happened.”  

“Which has been duly noted in your personnel file.”  The HR woman continued.  “You are welcome, in fact encouraged, to apply for other positions within the company.  But Megacorp has guidelines for these matters and frankly you should never have been hired for the position you held.”

So Lacey took her severance check, a crappy one month’s salary, and checked the company Positions Available page.

The only ones she actually had the qualification for all sounded suspiciously like file clerks and gofers.  She filled out the applications anyway.  She needed the money.  

To put the icing on the cake, she tripped over Gaston’s packed suitcases when she got home that night.  “What’s this?”

“Dad got me an interview at Blizzard.”

“Were you planning on telling me about that or just have me come home and find you’d left?”  Lacey demanded.  

“Now don’t be like that, Lace.”  Gaston tried to placate her.  “It wasn’t like either of us thought this was a long term thing.  We had our fun, but I need to go where I can find work.  Tell you what, once I get settled I’ll see if they have a job opening for you.”

“I can’t move to California, Gaston.”  Lacey pointed out.  “Dad can’t leave Maine and I have look out for him.  I wasn’t sure I could move as far away as Burlington.”

Gaston shrugged. “Well, then I guess I’ll be going.  Hey, I don’t suppose you could drive me to the airport?”

She did not.

“It’s not like I’m gonna miss his sorry ass.  The sex was nothing to write home about.  But he covered the rent.”  Lacey complained to Ruby the next day at the diner.  “I couldn’t pay the rent on that place even with my old job and you know Megacorp is going to contest my unemployment.”

“That sucks.” Ruby agreed.  “We can give you three or four shifts a week here and any you can pick up from the other waitresses.  That’ll get you by while you look for another job.”

“Thanks.”  Lacey tried to be grateful.  But she had so hoped to have put waiting table behind her.  

And it wasn’t like there were a whole lot of tech companies in coastal Maine.  She was probably going to have to move south to find work.  Which meant the headache of looking after her Dad from out of town.  

She had been working at Granny’s for about a week when late in the lunch shift two men came in.  One of them was about medium height, fairly good looking in a broody poet sort of way and dressed like he was in a period drama complete with a weird top hat thing.

The other was Mr. Gold.  

They sat down at one of Ruby’s tables, but Lacey marched over to them anyway.  “Hey, You’re the jerk who got me fired!”

Gold reared back and blinked at her.  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, that’s good.  I was at Megacorp and you came to fix our data center, remember?  Only you wouldn’t do it.”

“Well, I remember her.”  The other man put in.  “You talked about her and the ghastly server system they had for about an hour when you got back.”

“I remember the job.”  Gold told him testily.  “I no remember anything about anyone bein’ fired.”

“When you wouldn’t do it...”

He interrupted. “You weren’t goin’ to pay me.  Of course I wouldn’t do it.”

She ignored him. “My idiot boss reinstalled the corrupted backups and managed to take down the entire company’s system.”

The guy in the top hat whistled.  “Now that takes talent.”

“So corporate closed the office here and I got fired.”  She finished.  “And there aren’t any other tech companies hiring in the entire state. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“None of which is my fault.”  Gold denied.

“What do you do?” Top hat asked.

“What?”  Lacey asked.

“What did you do at this job Rum so inconsiderately got you fired from?”  Hat guy was smirking a bit.

“I dinna’...” Gold sputtered.

“Well, not directly, but it does seem like you were in the chain of causation. You’re the one who’s always lecturing on how actions have consequences.”  

Hat guy turned back to Lacey.  Grinning broadly now.  “So we should help the lovely lady...”

Gold snorted at the description.  Lacey glared at him.  Hat guy continued.  “...Find another position.”

“I’m a project manager.”  When Gold raised an eyebrow at that, she declared.  “I’m certified and everything.”

Granted the certification came from an on-line course and she had fibbed a little about having a college degree.  

“Perfect.”  Hat guy clapped.  “As it happened we need a good manager.”

“We do?”  Gold asked.  

“You’re the one who’s also always complaining about all the time you spend on paperwork.”  Hat guy’s smile had changed to a smirk.  He clearly was pulling something on his… partner, Lacey guessed.  “You were bitching only yesterday about having to waste half the day on the Google advertising.”

He turned to Lacey, “How are you with Google ad words, Ms…?”

“French.  Lacey French.”  Gold smirked slightly at that.  She glared at him some more.  “Sure I can do website maintenance.”

They had covered it in the on-line course when she got her certification.  It had looked easy enough.  

“How about bookkeeping?”  Hat guy leaned forward conspiratorially.  “Rum spends a couple of days a month just on bookkeeping.”

Here she was on certain ground.  “I’ve done the books and taxes for my Dad’s florist shop from the time I was twelve.  What program are you using?”

“Just a spreadsheet.”  Mr. Gold, who was apparently named Rum, muttered.

“No wonder it takes a couple of days.”    

“It’s an excellent spreadsheet.  I wrote it myself.”  He was indignant.

“So it sounds like she’d be perfect.”  Hat guy clapped his hands.  “Come on, Rum. It’ll be fun to have someone else around to play with.”

She did not like the sound of that and looked at Hat guy suspiciously.

“Jeff designs games.”  Gold quickly explained.  He sighed, “I suppose we could use someone to help with testing.

“You’ll meed to be flexible.  We’re a small family business.”  Gold told her. “And it would be temporary.”

“To start anyway.” Jeff put in.  

“And we probably can’t match what you were making at Megacorp.”  Gold frowned at his partner.  “Say eighteen an hour?”

That was actually more than she was making at Megacorp.  “I can live with that.”

“Come by tomorrow at 9:00.”  Gold handed her a card.  “Now can we get some lunch?”  

  The address on the card looked like somebody’s house.  Somebody rich.  It was a three story pink Victorian which was really nicely kept up.

Gold answered the door and showed her around.  “You’ll be answering the phone along with the paperwork.  I’ve prepared a script for you.  There’s a database of customers.  The ones who have service contracts with us get first priority.

“Your station will be there.”  He pointed to a standard cubicle set up in what had once been the parlor of the old house.  There were a couple of others which looked like they were primarily used for storage.  Behind them an old oak table was stacked with paper.  

“This is Jeff’s office.”  He led her through into what she guessed had been the dining room.  Solid mahogany desk and credenza held computer gear, stacks of papers and a strange collection of toys and gimcracks. Another matching desk held a lot of organizers.  Which did not look very organized.  “For God’s sake don’t touch anything in here unless Jeff has put it on this desk.  Incoming materials go here as well.

“The toilet is off the main hallway.  Kitchen is through there.”  He waved at a set of sliding doors.  “You can get to it from the hallway as well.  Help yourself, but make a note if we’re running out of anything.

“I’ll be downstairs if you have any questions.”  He paused.  “Uhm, Jeff can be a bit… whimsical.  If he asks you to do anything that seems… odd, you might want to check with me.”

“We talking strip to my knickers odd or pick shit up from his dealer odd?”  When Gold blinked at her she added.  “I can handle him either way.  I just want to know what to expect.”

“More like do a census of the fairies at the bottom of the garden odd.”  Gold’s mouth quirked.  “Jeff has a head injury from a car accident.  He’s functional, well most of the time, but sometimes he has a little trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy.”

“Is that when you hurt your leg?”  Great.  She was working for a nut job and a gimp. First thing she was going to do was check their bank account and make sure her paychecks were not going to bounce.

“No.”  His lips thinned.  “Not the same accident.  Mine was courtesy of the Taliban.”

“You’re a vet?” He was only a couple of inches taller than she was.

“Aye.”  His voice became sardonic.  “The army’s physical standards aren’t nearly as high for their techs.  Especially not ones who speak Urdu.”

“Where’d you learn Urdu?”

“Glasgow.  Lot of our neighbors were from Pakistan.  And the Mother of a mate of mine didn’t speak any English.”  He led her back to the cubicles.

“That’s should get you started.”  He looked her up and down.  “Uhm, about your clothes...”

“What’s wrong with my clothes?”  She demanded.  She looked good today. Her best pair of nude heels showed off her legs like nobody’s business.  Granted the little blue pleated skirt was short, but so was she.  Anything longer looked dowdy and she was damned if she was going to dress like some librarian just cause her boss was a prude. She had enough of that from her Dad growing up.

Gold sighed.  “Never mind.  It’ll probably be good for him to have to practice minding his manners and not staring.”

With that baffling statement he turned toward the stairs.  She called out to stop him. “You want to see my Green Card now?”  She pulled it out of her purse.

Gold blinked at her. “Not particularly.  Why would I?”

“So you can fill out the form showing I’m not illegal?”  She held out the documents.

“Undocumented.” Gold corrected her.  “There’s a form?”

“Yeah.”  She said.  “You never hire anybody before?”

“Not really.” He admitted.  “Leroy does the occasional odd job for us, but we just pay him as a contractor.

“But since you clearly know more about it than I do that can be your first task.” He waved in the general direction of the computer.  “Find it.  Fill it out.  I’ll be downstairs in the workshop trying to catch up on the work I should have been doing while doing your orientation.  You can bring the form down for me to sign when you finish it.”

He headed toward a door under the stairs.  She called after him.  “I suppose you expect me to bring you a cuppa while I’m about it?”

“Thank you, yes. Lemon, one sugar.”  He called back over his shoulder.

Lemon her ass.  She tossed her purse under the table.  She would show him she was no tea lady.

Her good friend Google had no trouble finding the forms she needed.  The only problem she had in getting them filled out was figuring out how to turn on the stupid printer which appeared to be nearly as old as she was.  

Because she was going to be the best damn manager in the whole damn state and show that nerd what for, she actually made a pot of tea while she was waiting for the print job to finish.  And fixed him a cup just as he asked, using a nice china tea cup and saucer from the hutch.  

“I have your tea and the forms ready for you to sign, Mr. Gold.”  She called our sweetly as she descended the stairs.

She set the tea down on a clear spot at the U shaped desk he was working at and handed him the papers as she described them.  “W-4 for the IRS, I-9 for immigration, whatever this thing for the Maine Income Tax people is called, and a standard non-disclosure agreement.”

Gold blinked at the stack.  And started to read the non-disclosure agreement.  “That’s very… efficient of you.”

“You really should have had me sign that before you gave me your log in codes.” She kept her voice sweet.  “Why I could be up there stealing all your secrets.”

“I dinna figured you’d be around long enough to learn any.”  Gold muttered as he read.

He absentmindedly picked up the cup of tea and took a sip.  Then he looked at her suspiciously.  “This is perfect.  You didn’t spit in it did you?”

“I’m too good an Aussie to mess with a cuppa.”  She smirked.  “Otherwise you’d of gotten salt instead of sugar.”

“Uhm, in that case, thank you.”  

She looked around the basement as he read through the forms.  At first glance it looked chaotic, but looking closer it sort out into sections.  New parts sorted into bins.  Old machines in various states of disembowelment set out on tables around the edge of the room, which looked like it took up about half of the house’s footprint.  She spotted a door that probably led to the rest of the basement.

Half the U shaped desk was actually a workbench along the wall under one of the windows.  Tools neatly hung from the rack on the wall under the window.  What looked like several projects with pieces and wires each confined to it’s own section.  Computer keyboards and monitors took up the other side of the U with papers covering the joining section. A couple of comfortable chairs sat facing him from the other side.

It was actually a nicely set up workroom.  Orderly without being anal about it.  It must be connected to the HVAC system because it was a comfortable temperature and did not have any of the musty smell you usually got in the basements of old houses.  

One thing did stand out.  “Is that a spinning wheel?”

Gold looked up from the paperwork.  “Aye.  I use it when I’m waiting around for things to cool or code to compile.” 

“I’ve never run across a programmer who spun.  Juggle, play guitar or other odd stuff, but not spinning.”

“Me Aunts ran a yarn shop.  They taught me when I was a lad.”  

He glanced at the copy of her green card she had attached to the I-9 and smirked.  “Your name really is Lacey French?”

“Yes, it’s my real name.  No, I did not pick it because I was getting a job as a stripper.”  She huffed.  “And I’m not sure you’re in a position to comment, Ragnor.”

She had found his name on the company tax forms.

“Touche.” He agreed.  “It was the sixties.  I blame the drugs.”

“There were some of those going around in the 80s too.”  She took back the forms.  “What do you want done next?”

“That stacks of stuff on the table needs to be filed.”  Gold told her.  “And remind Jeff when he comes in that we’ve got a conference call with the artist for his game at two.  Then remind him again every hour until then.”

She finished the filing before Jeff showed up at 11:30.  Wearing the top hat, a different frock coat and a yellow ascot with burgundy polka  dots.  And Gold had the nerve to comment on her clothes.  

Before she got the chance Gold came upstairs to remind him about the conference call.  And to ask,  “Did you take your meds this morning?”

“Yes, mother.  And I ate my breakfast and brushed my teeth.”  

Jeff was less demanding than Gold.  He did give her a bunch more filing to do.

When lunch time rolled around Jeff made a couple of sandwiches and took them downstairs.  “I’m going to go over the specs for the graphics we’re going to be talking about this afternoon.  The artists always want to use way too much memory. Help yourself to whatever is in the fridge.”

There turned out to be a really nice cheese and fruit plate in the fridge. Lacey had it for lunch.

Gold and Jeff had been on the conference call for over an hour when Lacey noticed a couple of kids running up the front walk.  At the last minute they veered around the edge of the house toward the back. Lacey headed down the hall and almost made it to the kitchen before she heard the back door open and a little girl’s voice call out. “Daddy, we’re home.”

She found the girl, (grade school age?  Lacey was not good with kids’ ages) and an older boy hanging up jackets and stowing backpacks on a shelf clearly set up for just that,  

They both looked up as she came into the room.  “Uhm, hey.”  Said the boy, who despite dark curly air had to be Gold’s son.  The genetics were obvious.

“Are you the new project manager?”  He asked.  “Dad said you were going to start today.”

Nice that somebody got briefed.  “Yeah, I’m Lacey.  And you are?”

“He’s Neal and I’m Grace.”  The girl put in.  “What’s a project manager?”

“I’m suppose to help your Dads,”  That left it nicely vague as to whether Gold and Jeff were together or not.  “Get their work done on time and not forget stuff.”

“That will be good.”  Grace said solemnly.  “Because Daddy forgets things and Uncle Rum is sometimes too busy to remind him.”

At least that clarified the genetics.

Neal made a bee-line for the refrigerator.  “Looks like Dad forgot our snack.”

Oh, Hell.  She had eaten his kid’s after school snack.  She had never managed to get herself fired on her first day before.

Quickly she joined the boy at the refrigerator.  “How about I make you a proper Tea?  You like scones?”

The scones were coming out out the oven when Gold and Jeff emerged from the conference call.  Grace ran to hug Jeff.  “Daddy, Lacey taught me how to make real scones.  Just like the Queen eats.”

“Excellent, dormouse.  We’ll be all set when she comes to call.”  Jeff told her.

Neal was just finishing setting the table with the nice china from the hutch that Lacey had used earlier for Gold’s tea.  He had insisted that, “Aunt Flora would rise out of the grave if we served a ‘proper’ tea with the every day mugs.”

“So you’ve all become acquainted then?”  Gold took the seat at the head of the table.

“We have.”  Lacey set the tea pot in front of him.  “Such a pleasant surprise when they arrived home.”

“I did say it was a family business.”  Gold smirked.

A test passed apparently.  “If you’ll be mother, I’ll serve the scones.”

“How do you like your tea?”  He asked starting to pour.

It was actually a nice afternoon break.  Grace informed them in detail about the latest chapter of Charlotte’s Web her teacher had read to the class.

Neal’s responses to Gold’s questions about his day were more monosyllabic. Lacey upped her estimate of his age by a couple of years.  From the amount of food he was putting away he had to be a teenager despite his small size.

When he finished his fourth scone he got more talkative.  “Can the team come over Friday?  We need more practice.”

“I’ve got a repair call in Ellsworth.” Then glancing her way, he smirked.  “But if Jeff and Lacey can supervise you I don’t see why not.”

Neal, glanced Jeff’s way then turned to her.  “Would that be okay, Lacey?  If we’re going to get anywhere in the competition we really need more practice and Dr. Jekyll, our coach, won’t work later than 4:00.”

And from what she had seen of Jeff so far, nobody was going to trust their kid to his supervision alone.  She had to wonder how he was looking after Grace.  Great.  Tea lady and babysitter.  This was clearly another test on Gold’s part.  To see how far he could push her.  “What kind of competition is it?”

“The STEMletics.  It’s like the Mathletics but covers science, technology and engineering as well.  Teams compete against each other like in the old College Bowl.  We really need to get faster at coming up with answers to have a shot at winning.”  

Clearly Gold had majored to sire a baby nerd.  She had no idea what the College Bowl was but it did not sound like it would be all that hard to ride herd on a few teenagers.  After all she knew what sort of mischief they were likely to get up to from experience.  “Sure I’ll bring refreshments.”

After tea was done, Jeff took Grace off to his office to do her homework and Neal disappear to where ever boys his age disappeared to.  Gold told her.  “Leave the dishes. I’ll do them tonight when I do the washing up from dinner.”

At least she was not expected to be the maid as well.

[peakwealth]

From Kampala: THE BLIND SPOT

Don’t worry, be happy, or is someone to blame for the runaway population in sub-Saharan Africa?

Crowded minibus station in Mbarara, Uganda. (February 2019)

Squeezed into the back seat of a beat up Toyota Corolla with six other passengers (including two small children), it is hard to avoid the issue of demography. Up front, three burly men take up the premium seats while the driver's head is sticking out the window. How he manages to shift gears, I cannot see or imagine. Thus we make it to the next town, two hours away, across the mountains.

At home, I am used to being more or less invisible. Being over sixty-five now, I am part of a rapidly growing demographic. No one pays any attention to me. It's a different story in Africa where the population over sixty-five is vanishingly small. I have curiosity value, all the more so in the back of a shaggy taxi from another century. Even people over fifty are relatively few. The median age in Uganda is just under sixteen years.

Sixteen.

By way of comparison, that figure is almost 27 in India and 37 in China (ageing quickly). Germany is near the top of the European range at 47.1 and Japan maxes out at 47.3. The average for all of Africa is a shade under 20.

What does this mean? It means the majority of Uganda's population is not made up of adults but of children and teenagers, something that is hard for westerners to get their heads around. It means that many girls become mothers at fifteen and grandmothers at thirty. I realized this talking to a young woman in Fort Portal. A five year old boy was wandering nearby. "Is that your son?", I asked. "No, that's Anthony, he's my grandson." I turned around and asked her how old she was: "Thirty-four", she said, giggling.

It means that one generation is piled on top of the previous one, without pause, weighing down society with cascading poverty and a structural lack of prospects. Frustration and inequality go up as ever more young people, connected to the internet as they are anywhere else, see their hopes and ambitions go unrealized.

It also means that pressure on resources and on the land is increasing at an alarming rate. I have no idea what Uganda's ecological carrying capacity might be, but it is an important consideration because most of the population continues to rely on subsistence farming, meaning they need their own plots to grow food. In only ten years’ time the population density has increased from 140 to 230 people/ sq.km. (It stood at 34/sq.km in 1960.) These are not mere 'indicators'. Habitat encroachment is visible to the naked eye as the expansion of housing and subsistence farmland stretches further and further into the distance.

In the end it may not matter if Uganda runs out of resources since it lacks the economic base to support this expanding population to begin with. The economy generates neither sufficient growth nor enough formal, steady employment. Much of the growth is already gobbled up by debt servicing (1). For too many young people there is little real future.

Actual output per person has lagged behind the overall expansion of the economy. Per capita GDP now stands around a sobering USD 700 (in current dollars) or roughly USD 2000 at purchasing power parity (assuming such parity can be calculated in a largely informal economy). That is lower than in Zimbabwe. Kenya, the neighbour to the east, is way ahead with over USD 1500 (in current dollars). Rather than progressing towards becoming an emerging economy, Uganda looks more like a structurally stalling country, held back by demographic incontinence.

Back in 1960, before Uganda became independent from Britain, it had less than 7 million people. It was called the garden of Africa. Today it has 45 million and is projected to reach 106 million by 2050. In 1960 its fertility rate stood at around 7 children; in the nearly sixty years of development since then it has declined by only one child (from 6.95 to 5.82) giving Uganda the second highest rate of population growth in the world (2). This year alone Uganda will add 1,4 million new citizens and that number will rise to two million a year, even as the rate of population growth softens. In polite African company, this is still referred to as the "demographic dividend".

Staggering as the figures are, they are fully matched by what can be observed while travelling around the country. Destitution and idleness remain pervasive. Electrical power from the grid is rare in rural Uganda, as is piped water. Even where power lines exist, people don't have the money to pay for the hookup. Children carrying water in yellow jerrycans are still a defining image of this country (as they are in many African countries). It was a nightmare when I first travelled in East-Africa, decades ago. It continues today as new generations get trapped in poverty, rather than being 'lifted' out of it, and human capital goes to waste.

This does not mean all of Uganda is a mess or there is no progress. There is: literacy and life expectancy are rising (as is a measure of contraception through Marie Stopes centres, among others); basic infrastructure is improving. But at 4 to 6 %, the annual increase in economic output is not enough to catch up with the growing population. Millions of people are standing around, doing little or earning next to nothing as they work the land or do such (hard) labour as pushing bicycles uphill loaded with green bananas or bags of cement. Even the official poverty rate, determined by the Ugandan bureau of statistics and set absurdly low as it is (a daily personal income of a dollar or two), is now actually going up. As elsewhere in the world, growth tends not to be inclusive, meaning that wealth creation for the few (mostly in Kampala) precedes poverty alleviation for the many (in the countryside). Stunning inequality results.

It need not have been like this. The fertility rate in much of South-East Asia used to be almost on par with Africa's but has fallen steadily. By now it is only slightly above replacement level. Not so in Uganda. Ever since he seized power in 1986, Yoweri Museveni, now in his thirty-third year as Uganda's president, has shown little interest in limiting the country's population (3). African insouciance? Dereliction of duty? Sleepwalking towards disaster? Museveni is not alone in having this blind spot. Many domineering African leaders have a weakness for large populations. Some are more upfront about it than others. Last September, Tanzania's president John Magufuli urged women to abandon contraception. There was no need for it, he said.

Not only is fertility deeply rooted in African tradition, large families are a matter of prestige, a patriarchal fantasy.  Women's education, rapid economic progress, urbanization and female empowerment, generally the keys to containing fertility,  have not taken root or not nearly enough to drive home the message: fewer children equals a better life. (4)

Uganda is also overflowing with Christian propaganda, glorifying "the joy of the family". It has been targeted by evangelical fundamentalists from the USA who have poured money into the country to promote their biblical worldview. Eradicating homosexuality has arguably been more part of their agenda than population control.

The results are, by any rational standard, troubling.

Firewood and charcoal market on the shore of lake Victoria in Nakiwogo, Entebbe, Uganda. Both are used for cooking. An orange coloured tray in the foreground sells for 5000 Ugandan shillings (USD 1,36). A small tray costs 2000 shillings. (February 2019)

Rwanda, the tiny neighbour to the south, has a population pushing thirteen million. It prides itself on being the display window of orderly and effective governance in East Africa. And indeed, few if any African countries can match Rwanda for organization, seriousness and just cleanliness. Crawling through Kampala's suffocating traffic jams, the neatness of Kigali is hard to imagine.

Critically, Rwanda has rebounded from the genocide of 1994. Despite being a caricature of colonial, almost farcical Christianity (or maybe because of it?), the country appears to be stable under the no-nonsense presidency of Paul Kagamé. Clever development policies are in evidence. Order prevails. Drivers stop at pedestrian crossings and traffic police hand out fines with printed receipts. Such things are not exactly standard practice in Africa. Yet some of the problems facing Uganda in the future are already perceptible in Rwanda today. The minute you cross the border, you clearly see the much higher pressure on the land. The figures confirm this: Rwanda's population density (520 people /sq. km), is on par with South-Korea's and greater than that of Holland, two of the most densely inhabited (and industrialized) countries in the world. Industrialization is wafer thin in Rwanda, as it is in Uganda.

Progress and sound policies notwithstanding, Rwanda remains a desperately poor country, especially in rural areas. Uncontrolled deforestation, so long a telltale sign of demographic distress, continues as Rwandans (or refugees) cut whatever trees they can get their hands on for firewood or charcoal. As in Uganda, the underlying problem is that Rwanda's economy is not nearly robust enough to provide for all its people. Although the fertility rate has been halved since 1960, it is still a burden. And the gap between the modern, landscaped capital, Kigali, and the shockingly dusty countryside is such that a massive population shift to the big city will be hard to avoid.

In Asia and in Latin America, poverty alleviation converged with a rapid reduction in population growth. One is logically difficult to achieve without the other. This is what facilitated the elimination of extreme poverty in so much of China, in South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. Unfortunately this is not happening in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, the DRC, Uganda...

The problem is not merely one of firewood, or water supply or electricity. Sub-Saharan Africa seems stuck in the same rut as decades ago. Heavy trucks of the UN World Food Program rumble through the towns, the UNHCR, IOM, WHO, USAID shuttle from one refugee camp to the next; global aid agencies like Doctors Without Borders rush medical crews to new emergencies (where they do save countless lives). Both the African Union and the UN are engaged in peacekeeping missions that seem without end.

As slippery as this terrain may appear, the demographic backdrop to Africa's development ailments is hard to ignore. It is the elephant in the room. And the elephant is unlikely to go very far as long as a significant number of African states show little or no interest in containing their runaway populations.

At different levels, both Rwanda and Uganda prefigure the demographic reckoning that awaits Africa and, by ricochet, the world beyond. The pressures to escape poverty and to migrate will exacerbate other challenges already rising across much of Africa: the competition for resources, food security made unpredictable by climate change; regional armed conflicts; theocolonial interference and the ascendency of religious fanaticism including Islamist insurgencies. Those are a few of the issues that are set to rock Africa's boat and dramatically change the face of our planet as the century unfolds.

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Factual sources:  tradingeconomics.com; indexmundi.com; CIA Factbook; Uganda Bureau of Statistics (www.ubos.org); World Bank; UNICEF; PricewaterhouseCoopers: Uganda Economic Outlook 2019 ( www.pwc.com/ug/en.html ); The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Goalkeepers Report 2018.

(1) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uganda-economy-gdp/ugandas-economy-must-grow-7-percent-a-year-to-service-rising-debt-central-bank-idUSKCN1HD16S

(2) Niger has the youngest population in the world with a median age of 15.3 years.

(3) Museveni's perspective on Uganda's development can be found on the official presidential website: https://www.yowerikmuseveni.com/address-national-state-affairs

(4) In 2015 Uganda's new National Development Plan (NDP II) called for the reduction of fertility to 4.5 children per woman by 2020. Clearly this target is not being met.

[silver-and-ivory]

replies which are good, summaries which are hard

These are the responses so far to my post here. All of them are interesting and it is good to learn more. So let us begin responding!

@collapsedsquid​

I think this is referring to something like Modern Monetary theory.  Basically, demand for money is created by taxation, supply by spending, and “government debt” is basically irrelevant. (Here’s a quickie piece on it)

Yes, this is indeed what I’m referencing. I’ll summarize what I understand from this piece later.

@femmenietzsche

I have a degree in this but I am so not an expert and some of this is half-remembered. Anyone feel free to correct me.

If you’re the government, in order to pay for things you can draw on your nation’s economy through taxation or you can accumulate debt. But you can only accumulate so much debt before creditors start to worry about being paid back, which could cause huge economic problems. (Inflating away the debt can cause similar problems, since your creditors aren’t getting paid what they expected in real terms.) So the debt-to-GDP ratio can’t go up forever. But since GDP is growing over time, the debt can keep growing over time as well. That is, the government can run a persistent deficit year after year without causing problems. (Though keeping the debt too high can cause problems, e.g. if you need to suddenly double spending to pay for a war.)

But, like, there are only a few ways you can increase nominal GDP. You can grow your population or increase your productivity. Those increase both real and nominal GDP, but you can only do either so quickly. Or you can print money beyond the growth in real GDP, which just increases nominal GDP. That’s inflation, which isn’t bad in reasonable amounts. But if you push it too far, then you get inflation-related problems. So there are basic limits to how big your deficit can be in the long run without debt eventually spiraling out of control. In practice population growth + productivity growth + inflation will allow you to run a budget deficit of a few % of GDP indefinitely, but not much more than that. Everything else has to be paid for through taxation.

But when people worry about debt per se, just remind them that the British government is still paying off war debts from the American Revolution, and that didn’t stop them from building a global empire, because eventually the debt’s size became inconsequential.

@discoursedrome

So I don’t know shit about economics and someone who does would undoubtedly have a better explanation, but the relevant topic here I think is the “seignorage-maximizing rate” (which is a line of study that begins with this guy, I guess). The basic idea seems to be that printing more money generates revenues for the government (because it costs less than the materials that go into the money, with the difference being the seignorage), but it also reduces the demand for money, not just immediately but potentially in the longer-term depending on what it “tells” people about future monetary policy.

The upshot is that your ability to generate revenue by printing money is constrained by the demand curve, which is largely out of your control, and empirically the amount of money you can raise sustainably by this method appears to be well below government operating revenues. Printing too much money is “eating your seed corn” because it can have long-term effects on demand, and printing way too much money may actually drive the value of money into completely into the ground, so if I’m understanding this correctly there’s probably a need to get the lion’s share of your revenue from other sources just because you can’t get demand that high for the long term.

@voximperatoris

Using inflation to as a source of revenue is basically a very distortionary tax on holding currency. Value is transferred from the people holding currency to the people printing it (the same way counterfeiters profit). This discourages people from holding your currency, so the value will drop. If you try to compensate for the drop in value by increasing the rate of inflation, you will have a hyperinflationary “death spiral”.

That’s why the US government (or any other government) can’t fund all its spending through inflation. It’s just the same as if they tried to fund all spending by taxing soda. Eventually, no one would drink it, and increasing the tax to 1,000,000% wouldn’t raise any more revenue.

Of course, governments engaging in hyperinflation try to force people to hold currency, but people find ways to get around it.

@theopjones

Long-run neutrality of money.

A change in the money supply or the trajectory of some other nominal variable (inflation rate, nGDP) cannot change long-run rGDP or the long-run real interest rate.

There can of course, be a short-run effect (this is pretty much why demand-driven recessions happen), and thus strategically altering government deficit spending or the money supply is critical to maintaining economic stability. But it is impossible to use monetary policy to indefinitely expand deficits, or to keep the unemployment rate below the NAIRU.  An attempt to do so would be very inflationary and eventually hyperinflationary.

What I’m getting here from most people is that printing money significantly above rGDP increase results in hyperinflation eventually, because it will result in people not wanting your money or your debt due to acting in anticipation of your future policy. Also, if you keep trying to buy back your debt with new inflated money you will end up devaluing your currency even more, which means that less people will want your currency unless you force people to use it. vox imperatoris adds that this is basically a (more inefficient, with more problems) tax on people who have money.

Is this an accurate summation of the above?

Also, collapsedsquid links to a short article. The article contains responses to the criticisms made above:

MMT-ers do not claim that fiscal policy can ignore private willingness to hold government assets. On the contrary, they take from Wynne Godley’s sectoral balance analysis that fiscal policy should do a jujitsu to accommodate the changing net demand of the private and external sectors. MMT-ers very much agree that it is important not to lose access to the bond market, broadly construed. But they suggest that the government’s power to tax is sufficient to maintain the private sector’s appetite to hold government paper, whether in the form of bonds or of money. Therefore, there is little need to fret about “confidence” and undead theories of government solvency. The government can issue paper — make transfers, deficit spend, whatever — when the private and external sectors are willing to buy, and reduce deficits or even run a surplus when those appetites have been sated.

This is uncomfortably coercive! It is also subject to typical government-demanded restrictions on stuff.

If I understand the rest of the article: control over money supply is given by controlling the deficit- whether you buy more stuff, thereby creating money, or you get more stuff, thereby destroying money. By having a deficit, you create inflation; by getting more stuff you create negative inflation.

I think that this basically amounts to “taxes limit your ability to spend on stuff”, but now it looks fancier and is more confusing.

There are also some criticisms outlined here, which I’m going to summarize to check if I understand things properly:

1) Why are we focusing on this one thing so much? What if we focused on other things, that might be good.

2) Governments can’t be formally insolvent. But governments can and are subject to people freaking out and being like “you currency really sucks, I’m going to evade taxes/not buy bonds/whatever”.

4) Long thing that I don’t quite understand. But it seems to be mostly that government is subject to volatility, and increasing debt-to-nGDP is fairly vulnerable to negative effects and market scares. In addition, being too open to investment from private investors could result in distribution inequality, since the government insures against risk; and this places costs on the poor; alleviating this would require precise (and probably inefficient) manual governmental distribution of resources.

Interesting quote:

MMT-ers are right, I think, to argue that, for fiat-money issuers who borrow in their own currency, conventional government solvency criteria are false. They are right to argue that such governments have a great deal more latitude to issue money and debt than conventional theories suggest. But that shouldn’t be taken as license to defend carelessness in the distribution of new claims, or to treat expansions of money or debt as entirely cost-free. To be fair, this is a bit of a straw man. Serious MMT-ers think about distributional issues and quality of expenditure, and don’t claim that deficits should be “carelessly” expanded. But in the heat of current policy debates, rhetoric about “deficit terrorists” and money being nothing more than spreadsheet entries unhelpfully obscures that. At its best, a deep point of MMT is that the absence of short-term fiscal constraints creates space for government to craft policy that focuses on the productivity of the real economy.

It concludes by saying that money must be a function of Real Economic Stuff, which is an Austrian perspective.

5) It is very risky to employ this kind of policy, and the economic badness might not proceed how we expect. Basic gradualist type argument.

7) Taxing is coercive; government must maintain at least a facade of niceness.

Avoiding the need for sharp contractions later on might imply slower issue of obligations than would be short-term optimal during recessions. But once you acknowledge this kind of forward-looking dynamic, MMT starts to sound very conventional. We start having to trade off the short-term benefits of fiscal demand stimulation with long-term “exit costs”.

8) Solvency relates to political ability to tax, but political capacity is impacted by the real state of the economy. (Also, how exactly is solvency by tax different than any other straight “tax to get money” scheme?)

Miscellaneous Complaints: what should we do with the money we’re printing? Also, people should be more civil on the Internet.

(There is a part which I don’t understand and which I would be happy to have explained, about Nicke Rowe and being called out.)

Conclusions

According to the people who’ve responded to this, it seems that MMT has some very clear failure modes (hyperinflation, coerciveness, implicit taxes). According to the linked article, it’s vulnerable to not having enough safety measures and not taking certain factors into account; it has some interesting insights as well, such as that value is created by creating and destroying money and that solvency is created by coercion. One of its more important insights is that debt is okay in some form.

On reflection, I don’t think that the theory makes sense. It’s a terribly roundabout way of just taxing people, with lots of hard-to-measure results and a difficult, very involved way of ensuring solvency (or “solvency”).

If someone wants to continue this, I’d be willing, but 1) horribly unqualified and 2) probably not very prompt at responding.

[asrarblog]

Continued from Previous……

  The two things to happen after lockdown are #Stay at Home and #Work from Home. The #Flexible Hours is squeezed in between. These are new and first for everyone. The reactions are therefore highly variable.

First the difference between SAH and WFH.

#Stay at Home is for those jobs who cannot work at all. Sales teams, customer services teams, public dealing teams, front desk staff, operational teams if the plant is closed, transport staff, daily wage labors, and so on. Such staff has no provision for work during lockdown and are forced to stay at homes. It may be called ‘forced holiday’ which may turn out to be unpaid for some.

#Work from Home is for those who can keep working from a distance. They can collaborate online or through phones and can do most of their work online. HR, Accounts, IT, Marketing, Planning, Procurement are some examples of this kind. Software houses are already used to working with teams which are placed at various locations and they are least affected. #Work from Home is basically a change of location; the work largely remains the same.

There are practical issues in #Work from Home in Pakistan.

Majority of offices and businesses in Pakistan do not work online. The use of computer is mostly for keeping the data there, and even this use is not universally adopted. You will still find plenty of workplaces doing everything manually, and on paper.

A small fraction of lager companies is using ERP; SAP has become quite popular in this class. It is an entirely different debate if implementation of SAP is really helping in decision making or paperless environment; generally, none. Even among companies using SAP/Oracle or like, the software runs on inhouse servers, apparently for security reasons. Work online is not possible.

Authorization is still done on paper, even where an advanced ERP is installed. The document is printed and signed by various competent authorities.

Pharma companies have received exemption from lockdown and have better options. Others have no option other than stopping altogether or violating the lockdown.

#Work from Home therefore is rendered useless to a large extent due to our specific work environment and practices.

The other problem is attitude. It is almost impossible for most entrepreneurs to pay to their staff while they sit home and do nothing. It will require a lion’s heart and we are not known for such courtesy. Our business owners would still spend millions in charity to ward off the ‘Evil Virus’ but will not pay to workless people.

Two scenarios are emerging early.

For businesses, which have received exemption, there is a tendency to call as many people as can be done. The tendency is not limited to the CEOs; the managers are also displaying this attitude. They themselves are coming and calling their entire staff also.

For businesses which are not exempted, the decision is in suspense. The mood is not very pleasant, and we can keep fingers crossed about what will come out of it.

The additional concern is about the exact length of lockdown. Almost everyone echoes the sentiment that the lockdown till 7th April is the first episode; further extension will surely come. Another couple of weeks? Or more? Small businesses may not be able to sustain and may resort to cost cutting through layoffs and salary cuts. Larger ones are in a better situation to cope, unless they decide not to.

#Stay at Home therefore is a matter of anxiety for many. #Work from Home has limited practical application, but it is worth clinging to.

What should the #Stay at Home should do?

Those who are in this group must utilize this time to enhance their existing skills or learning new skills which would increase their value at the current job or for acquiring new job, if they have to. This is applicable to most office and white-collar jobs. Please do not consider it as holiday; consider that you have been suspended from job and you have to prove your worth to get it back.

Blue-Collar workers, if skilled, can also use the same principle. Skilled workers do have higher value and may not suffer later. Unskilled labor may not face too many problems. After the lockdown is lifted, they will be back to work, though they may have to suffer during this period.

#Work from Home needs a rigorous protocol and routine. Very detailed guidelines are coming from diverse sources which are addressing pertinent points. I recently received a similar communication from Liz Kislik. She is a long-time management consultant and contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. I am honored to be a fellow ReXer (Recognized Expert) with her. It is over to her for her recommendations. [Quote]

Create a schedule or routine. A little bit of flexible structure gives you something to hang on to. If you’re working from home, just labeling chunks of time can make the day feel saner and safer, like stepping-stones in a rushing river — even if you can’t stick to the plan.

Keep moving. Your body is made for movement, not for hunching over your laptop (as I admit I’m doing right this minute). In almost any size space you can jog or step in place and stretch. When you let your body do its work it will feel better about supporting the rest of you.

Seek beauty and pleasure. Everyone’s under pressure, including people who are still in denial about the pandemic’s reality. It’s amazing how a few minutes of intentional enjoyment — looking at the evening sky, listening to your favorite music, stroking a pet, or tasting something delicious — can improve your mood.

Stay in touch. Meet online, or reach out to colleagues you don’t think about every day but actually care about. If you’ve got a remote team, gather them for a quick morning coffee, a daily check-in, or a virtual happy hour. Schedule regular calls with loved ones, because if it’s on your calendar, you’re more likely to keep the appointment and get that boost of human contact.

Pause. Whenever you find yourself feeling scattered, making mistakes, or cycling repetitively through your thoughts, just hold still for a minute. Rest, right where you are. Let everything settle into the ground. Exhale all the way. Then inhale and exhale again. Let the cobwebs clear, and then return a bit more peacefully to whatever’s in front of you.

Create order. Because you’re out of routine, it’s easy to lose track and let work stuff comingle with home stuff, maybe even pick up a few Legos, until everything in your life feels like a mess. Consciously clean up a little after each chunk of time or activity so your space and your person both feel less overwhelmed.

Compartmentalize. Sometimes you just need to stop thinking about how bad things are, and how frightening it would be if your imagined worst-case scenario came true. Deliberately tell yourself, “I’ve spent enough time on that worry today. I’ll think about it again tomorrow,” and then focus fully only on what’s happening now.

Help someone else. No matter how unsettled you feel, doing something kind for someone else can raise your spirits — or at the very least, provide a distraction. Call elderly neighbors, contribute to an organization you care about, or buy a gift certificate from a local business that can use the cash while people aren’t out shopping.

Think about something interesting. Too much news can flip you from well-informed to absolutely flooded by agitation and hopelessness. Instead, set off little sparks in your brain by learning something new. Revving your brainpower positively can help trigger fresh ideas about some of the ongoing challenges you’re facing.

Express love for your loved ones, for strangers, and for yourself. Your willingness to believe and feel that other human beings are worthy of love and care can lift you out of many a hole. And accepting that you yourself are worthy of love and care can remind you to feel compassion for your own frailties and mistakes and let others support you.

Yes, we’re all experiencing a hard time, and it’s not likely to end quickly. But it is possible to withstand, cope, and even to grow in the face of these dire threats. [unquote]

Continued……

COVID19; Stay at Home, Work from Home – Part V – Blog Post #308 by Asrar Qureshi Continued from Previous…… The two things to happen after lockdown are #Stay at Home and #Work from Home.

[qgaje8wz-blog]

Affordable Care Act: Why were men denied?

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What s the average progressive into different Insurance Groups. don t have children. please to buy one for and cheap major health i just want to for 17 year old? only have fire insurance.please $615, at a total (red unlikely). I plan Honda Civic Sedan 4 be, my monthly payment. answer and give me will not be doing cheapest 400 for my policy and me as car and getting insurance, rate for nearly exactly I need to do pay for a totalled help with finding some have an effect on pentalies for reinstating my for young drivers? in car, wont the insurance for a 2007 Mazda full every 6 months is my responsibility. Can clean licence, however live avenger. and need suggestions and got information on to me like there to insure my 2002 to cover me during can I purchase an male? with engine 1.4 it falls thru does does liability insurance cost brother is sending his EMPLOYEES OF THE COMPANY much would it cost .

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How much would yearly live in the State but in the meantime, a USAA membership with have a lot going of next June. I settle this insurance to is part of our does the player put one month pregnant but around for cars but parents plan. I don t workers. Do any one and im gonna be own business? I have an appointment soon I will insure under 21 already went to traffic a teen get lowered me and tell me afford it? WTF?!! Is would go up if it will cost me through my sisters business take about 6 hours expensive for me and Due to the way a car accident with up. If I cancel to get a rough was looking to buy driver who just turned looking for an insurer my insurance per month progressive. The coverage isnt possible? also does it which means it s only Can someone please clarify No one is forced is the dental insurance anyone who could explain .

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I wanna visit but was wondering if anyone health insurance? or best get insurance cause I cheapest car insurance for I get insurance if the price to go quote, but i dont what does it cost am looking for treatment for a 2000 jetta and I am still handle renting a car? at to choose a agency. do make a go up per month or do they want ANSWER! thank you for months. i think this and am going to have a license yet one year ago since for me and my e cheepeat to ensure vs. liability insurance? i ask you to provide group of car insurance but I do need my bike, will insurance required to change the What is the best and need dental insurance.. im 17 and have need to figure out with her insurance. The insuring a car, short a point from being insured so what do case of an accident? my parents car insurance, 2/9/10 for non-payment. We .

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[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

Marketing 101: Everything you need to know

If you’ve found your way to our blog chances are you work in marketing or you want some help with your marketing. But whether you’re an experienced marketer or a rookie we hope you’ll find something useful in this post.

This is our marketing 101 – an introduction to marketing. We’ve got a lot to cover so here’s a quick summary of what you’ll find if you keep reading:

CHAPTER ONE: A brief history of marketing

Okay, let’s not get carried away. We’re not starting with sponsored cave paintings. But we’ll take a look at some of the principles of marketing and how marketing has changed over the past 20 years.  

CHAPTER TWO: Building a marketing team

Next we’ll get into the different skills you’ll want access to in order to run effective marketing campaigns. To make this a little more interesting we’ve staffed your marketing department from the cast of the Avengers. We’ll also look at in-house versus outsourcing. And we’ll highlight some of the bear traps to avoid when working with third parties.

CHAPTER THREE: Marketing tactics and strategies

The third and final section will take a whistlestop tour through the most popular marketing tactics and strategies. We’ll cover content creation, SEO, social media marketing and email. And also run through the different challenges and opportunities at each stage of the marketing funnel.

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.” Mark Twain

CHAPTER ONE: A brief history of marketing

via GIPHY

It’s hard to imagine a marketing campaign today that doesn’t involve one or both of Google and Facebook. Marketing though is as old as the hills. But we’ll save the marketing trends of ancient Rome for another blog post. Here we’ll stick to the more recent history.

First, let’s define what we mean by marketing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines marketing like this:

“The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”

HubSpot, the marketing automation platform, has a more in-depth definition, which we prefer:

“Marketing is the process of getting people interested in your company’s product or service. This happens through market research, analysis, and understanding your ideal customer’s interests. Marketing pertains to all aspects of a business, including product development, distribution methods, sales, and advertising.”

And if you didn’t like either of those, here are no fewer than 72 definitions of marketing. Something for everyone in there.

Like David Packard (the “P” in HP) said: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department”. It’s not a bolt-on or an after-throught. At least, it shouldn’t be. Marketing is something that should be woven into the fabric of an organisation.

Philip Kotler, regarded by many as the father of modern marketing, describes marketing as “the art of creating genuine customer value”. Professor Kotler has published close to 60 books on marketing since the 1970s. Something he’s written and spoken about extensively is the different marketing orientations that have captured the attention of marketers and business leaders over the years. As this is the history chapter let’s dive into that.

Marketing philosophies, concepts and orientations

There are a whole bunch of models and frameworks for analysing different approaches to marketing through the decades. We’re going with a popular one: the five marketing concepts as set out by Graeme Drummond and John Ensor (descriptions are our own):

The Production Concept: This stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap approach emerged during the industrial revolution. The idea is that supply creates its own demand. Companies should focus on scale and efficiency, because what consumers want is easily-available, affordable products. The priority for marketing is raising awareness. There is still plenty of evidence of this approach in practice today.

The Product Concept: This one is in many ways a reaction to the Production Concept. Rather than price and availability the focus here is quality. Companies build their strategy and marketing campaigns around their product’s quality, performance and features.

The Selling Concept: We could sum up this one as: “churn and burn”. The idea is to aggressively chase down every deal and prioritise short-term sales numbers over everything else.

The Marketing Concept: This orientation treats the customers a little less like sheep and instead puts them at the heart of the strategy. The Marketing Concept is about understanding what the customer wants. And then creating a marketing plan that speaks to those needs more effectively than your competition. 

The Societal Concept: This final orientation builds on the Marketing Concept. The needs of the customer are still paramount. But it also considers the wider impact of the organisation’s activities on the environment, community and natural resources.

Marketing in the digital age

You don’t have to work in marketing to be aware that the internet has been a huge disruptor in the marketing space. The internet has changed how people work, shop, entertain themselves and interact with one another. No industry has escaped the internet’s winds of change, but few have felt them as keenly as marketing.

Let’s take a look at where marketing dollars have been doing over the past 20 years. Back in 1999, we were all worrying about the Millennium Bug, the Backstreet Boys were number one and “The Matrix” had just come out. Marketing looked very different.

Fewer than 300 million people had access to the internet. As a result, television, print and outdoor advertising gobbled up the lion’s share of marketing budgets.

Fast forward to 2019 and we still have the Backstreet Boys. But the global internet population has exploded to 4.3 billion, according to Internet World Stats. This is what happened to ad spend over that period, courtesy of Zenith Media, an ad agency.

You can see that online ads have now eclipsed other channels. Outdoor was the first to go in 2005, followed a year later by radio. Print, which has lost the most market share to digital, went in 2013. Television spend has been growing, driven by a renaissance in content quality. But even that was overtaken by online spend in 2016. Zenith predicts that 2019 internet ad spend will top USD $274 billion.

But these headline numbers don’t tell the real story. This is really about the two companies we mentioned in our introduction. Two companies the Backstreet Boys wouldn’t even have heard of when they were working on the lyrics to “I Want It That Way”.

Facebook first. Last year, the world’s largest social media network made USD $55 billion from advertising. That’s around a fifth of global online ad spend, but really it’s small potatoes. According to its parent company, Alphabet, our favourite search engine, Google, raked in more than USD $116 billion in 2018 from its ad products.

CHAPTER TWO: Building a marketing team

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Okay, we admit “how [insert product or service] is like [insert pop culture reference]” content is a massive cliche. But they went to a lot of effort with Avengers: Endgame (it cost USD $400 million) and you won’t hear about much else over the next couple of weeks. So, we’re doing it. Marketers, assemble!!

Web Design and UX: Tony Stark/Iron Man

As the man himself said in the first Avengers movie: “I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler.” Most web designers don’t have to pick up the tab. But they are essential when it comes to getting your marketing reality to match your vision.

What you’re looking for here is a techie who doesn’t just know how to build what you want but can also bring their own UX knowledge to your marketing campaigns. Tony has a bit of an ego that needs managing, but all the best hires do.

Analytics: David Banner/Hulk

Miss your numbers and he’ll turn green and demolish the office. But that’s a small price to pay in order to have your biggest brain crunching the numbers. Analytics are crucial to successful marketing. From understanding what your data is telling you to making the case for more budget.

You want someone who’s comfortable, not just with Google Analytics, but also whatever social media pages and third party tracking tools you’re using.

Creative: Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow

If you don’t have any actual super powers you have to get creative. Not the most tenuous link you’ll see in this month’s Endgame-inspired marketing blog deluge.

Ms Romonoff will add flair and the imagination you need to set your marketing campaigns apart from the competition. She’ll be able to turn her hand to design and video or find people who can. And she’ll come up with original and compelling ideas for packaging, presenting and promoting your key messages.

Writing: Thor

“Families can be tough. Before my father died, he told me I had a half-sister … that he imprisoned in Hell. Then she returned home, and stabbed me in the eye, so … I had to kill her. It’s life, isn’t it, I guess. I feel your pain.”

The God of Thunder has a way with words and got most of the best lines in “Avengers: Infinity War”, so look no further for your writer.

With such a premium on original content – and lots of it – you’ll always have plenty for your writer or writers to do. From turning out blogs and crafting new landing pages to snappy ad copy and engaging emails with clickable subject lines.

Editor: Clint Barton/Hawkeye

A poor man’s Jason Bourne, maybe. But he has an eye for detail. So, Clint Barton is your first choice for editor. It will be the editor’s job to ensure your campaigns fit the brief and that your brand guidelines are properly observed at all times.

Strategy and Project Management: Steve Rogers/Captain America

Experience is a vital element on any team. And how often do you get the chance to hire someone from America’s greatest generation?

Cap is a shoo-in for the strategy and project management role. You need someone who commands respect at all levels within the organisation. A stickler for doing things properly and ensuring deadlines are met, with military-grade strategic nous. His old school values and work ethic will get your projects delivered on time and on brief.

Outsourcing your marketing

Two problems with hiring the Avengers. First they don’t exist. And second they cost half a billion dollars per campaign.

Let’s assume you staff your marketing team with real humans. How do you decide what and when to outsource to third parties? We wrote a blog article on how content marketing agencies can be more effective than in-house teams. And as a content marketing agency, we obviously have a vested interest and natural bias.

So, rather than feather our own nest or recycle January’s blog article let’s take a look at some of the potential pitfalls of outsourcing parts of your marketing activity. Here are our top five based on our experience of helping clients pick up the pieces after bad agency experiences:

Losing access to Google Analytics, Google Ads or social media pages: Among the most damaging situations we’ve been asked to help out with are when clients have lost access to their data, social media profiles or even their whole site because a relationship with a third party has ended badly. You should outsource to get extra pairs of hands and bigger brains. Never to hand off responsibility for your company’s key assets.

Blackhat tactics to secure short-term results: Marketing is a competitive space and clients often ask for guaranteed results. So you can’t blame some agencies for giving them what they ask for. However, big promises often lead to disappointment or worse. Worse being short-term results delivered by nefarious methods that blow back on the client a few months later.

Technology lock-ins: There are lots of third party tools – free and paid – that can make a material difference to your marketing campaigns. But make sure you’re involved in deciding which tools to use. These choices matter and can have long-term consequences for your business. Maybe they lock you in to ongoing payments or tie you to a particular supplier for a lengthy period.

Outsourcing of knowledge: We quoted David Packard earlier in this post when we were talking about the importance of extending marketing beyond the marketing team. Marketing shouldn’t be siloed inside your organisation and it definitely shouldn’t be siloed outside of it. Agencies should add value both in terms of what they can do for you but also what they can teach you. Knowledge is something you always want to keep in-house.

Brand disconnect: A big challenge for agencies when stacking up against in-house teams is that they don’t get the chance to live and breathe the company culture every day. They are hired help and they work on multiple client accounts. As the client, you need to be aware of this risk from the outset and compensate by really engaging with the briefing and feedback process.

CHAPTER THREE: Marketing tactics and strategies

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In this chapter we’ll look at the marketing funnel and some of the popular tactics you’ll no doubt be familiar with for finding, engaging and nurturing leads.

The marketing funnel takes lots of different forms. Google it and you’ll see plenty of variations but also a common theme. Here is one of our favourites courtesy of Medium.com:

We like this one for its simplicity. You have three types of prospects:

In “Awareness”, it’s people who don’t know your brand or your products. Or don’t know that you can solve their problem.

In “Consideration”, people have engaged with you in some way already, but they’re not ready to buy for whatever reason (not the right time, haven’t been convinced yet).

And in “Action” they’ve reached decision time and it’s between you and the competition.

The challenges and opportunities for marketers change as people move down the funnel. But this sort of broad segmentation can be an extremely useful way to stress test your marketing campaign. Do you have content, a promotional strategy and a conversion goal for each funnel stage?

In our experience, brands often neglect the middle of the funnel, especially when it comes to setting a conversion goal. If website visitors – for example – have just two choices: leave or buy, you’re missing out on a massive lead generation and nurture opportunity.

So, let’s assume you’re sold on the marketing funnel idea and now you need some tactics and cool ideas to tackle each stage. Well, look no further. Here’s an intro, a top tip and a useful link for content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing and web design.

Content marketing basics

Content marketing is about creating valuable and relevant content that drives useful actions on the part of your target audience. You can use content marketing at every stage of the sales funnel from awareness with SEO-friendly blogs, to capturing mid-funnel leads with gated ebooks, to closing deals with compelling and well-targeted offer emails.

Top tip: Don’t rely on your creative skills to deliver ROI. Content needs to be promoted to get seen by the right people. As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, said: “Before you create any more ‘great content’ figure out how you’re going to market it first.”

Useful link: How does content marketing work?

SEO basics

In Chapter One we highlighted the huge share of global online ad spend held by Google. The reason for this is that Google owns consumer intent. It knows what we want, when we want it because we tell it (5.2 billion times so far today). This makes ranking for the right search terms hugely valuable to any business. SEO is a longer-term play and less certain than PPC, but the ROI when you get it right is hard to beat.

Top tip: When it comes to ranking pages, the site is often more important than the content. So, it pays to pick your battles when competing for popular keywords. As Moz founder Rand Fishkin put it: “Without any domain authority or page authority it’s almost impossible to rank for competitive terms.”

Useful link: Content marketing and SEO: A Speed Date

Social media marketing basics

If your audience isn’t Googling, there’s a good chance they’re on social media. On average we spend 142 minutes a day checking, scrolling, posting and liking, according to Global Web Index, a consumer profiling company. And we do most of it on the same networks. In fact, four of the six biggest social media sites by users are owned by Facebook (Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram). The second biggest is owned by Google (YouTube).

That means social media marketing is really about going where your audience is. A generation ago marketers bought ad space in newspapers that their target demographic read every morning over breakfast. Now, newspapers don’t have the eyeballs. It’s a social media app on a smartphone.

Top tip: For brands, social media sites are advertising platforms. But just like television and radio, the ad content needs to fit the medium. So take advantage of the free tools and helpful ideas that social media sites offer to create really compelling ad content for your marketing campaigns.

Useful link: The importance of compelling content in social media success

Email marketing basics

Email is the oldest digital marketing tactic. Even the Backstreet Boys with their dial-up modems back in 1999 got marketing emails. But just like Captain America, old doesn’t mean obsolete. And thanks to marketing automation, email is enjoying something of a renaissance.

When you’re chasing people at the middle and bottom of your marketing funnel, few tactics are more effective than a properly-targeted email campaign. And if you use marketing automation software, you can massively ramp up the scale and level of personalisation that your emails offer.

Top tip: If email is a big part of your marketing strategy, don’t forget to feed the hopper. You always need a plan for capturing more email addresses, whether that’s pop-up subscription forms, interactive quizzes or gated ebooks.  

Useful link: Your complete guide to successful drip email campaigns

Web design basics

Okay, so you can’t afford Tony Stark and no guarantee he knows about UX anyway. But web design has become an essential part of your marketing mix. People are increasingly hostile to slow, clunky online experiences. They want their interactions with brands to be smooth and fast on whichever device they use.

What this means is that your otherwise perfect marketing plan can hit a wall if your web design sucks. Maybe your form is difficult to fill in on mobile or the clever animated banner takes forever to load. You need someone with the web design and UX skills to put that right before it kills your conversion rate.

Top tip: Don’t underestimate the importance of mobile. We often hear that mobile doesn’t matter because most of the traffic is on desktops. That doesn’t mean people don’t want to access your site on a mobile, it means they can’t. People have multiple interactions with your brand these days, more and more of those will be on a mobile device, even if the purchase is on a desktop or in a store.  

Useful link: 60 UX Tips Whitepaper

from http://bit.ly/2KUEcql

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Understanding Web Design

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web.

Some who don’t understand web design nevertheless have the job of creating websites or supervising web designers and developers. Others who don’t understand web design are nevertheless professionally charged with evaluating it on behalf of the rest of us. Those who understand the least make the most noise. They are the ones leading charges, slamming doors, and throwing money—at all the wrong people and things.

If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Preferring real estate to architecture

It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.

The news media too often gets it wrong. Too much internet journalism follows the money; too little covers art and ideas. Driven by editors pressured by publishers worried about vanishing advertisers, even journalists who understand the web spend most of their time writing about deals and quoting dealmakers. Many do this even when the statement they’re quoting is patently self-serving and ludicrous—like Zuckerberg’s Law.

It’s not that Zuckerberg’s not news; and it’s not that business isn’t some journalists’ beat. But focusing on business to the exclusion of all else is like reporting on real estate deals while ignoring architecture.

And one tires of the news narrative’s one-dimensionalism. In 1994, the web was weird and wild, they told us. In ’99 it was a kingmaker; in ’01, a bust. In ’02, news folk discovered blogs; in ’04, perspiring guest bloggers on CNNexplained how citizen journalists were reinventing news and democracy and would determine who won that year’s presidential election. I forget how that one turned out.

When absurd predictions die ridiculous deaths, nobody resigns from the news room, they just throw a new line into the water—like marketers replacing a slogan that tanked. After decades of news commoditization, what’s amazing is how many good reporters there still are, and how hard many try to lay accurate information before the public. Sometimes you can almost hear it beneath the roar of the grotesque and the exceptional.

THE SUSTAINABLE CIRCLE OF SELF-REGARD

News media are not the only ones getting it wrong. Professional associations get it wrong every day, and commemorate their wrongness with an annual festival. Each year, advertising and design magazines and professional organizations hold contests for “new media design” judged by the winners of last year’s competitions. That they call it “new media design” tells them nothing and you and me everything.

Although there are exceptions, for the most part the creators of winning entries see the web as a vehicle for advertising and marketing campaigns in which the user passively experiences Flash and video content. For the active user, there is gaming—but what you and I think of as active web use is limited to clicking a “Digg this page” button.

The winning sites look fabulous as screen shots in glossy design annuals. When the winners become judges, they reward work like their own. Thus sites that behave like TV and look good between covers continue to be created, and a generation of clients and art directors thinks that stuff is the cream of web design.

DESIGN CRITICS GET IT WRONG, TOO

People who are smart about print can be less bright about the web. Their critical faculties, honed to perfection during the Kerning Wars, smash to bits against the barricades of our profession.

The less sophisticated lament on our behalf that we are stuck with ugly fonts. They wonder aloud how we can enjoy working in a medium that offers us less than absolute control over every atom of the visual experience. What they are secretly asking is whether or not we are real designers. (They suspect that we are not.) But these are the juniors, the design students and future critics. Their opinions are chiefly of interest to their professors, and one prays they have good ones.

More sophisticated critics understand that the web is not print and that limitations are part of every design discipline. Yet even these eggheads will sometimes succumb to fallacious comparatives. (I’ve done it myself, although long ago and strictly for giggles.) Where are the master pieces of web design, these critics cry. That Google Maps might be as representative of our age as the Mona Lisa was of Leonardo’s—and as brilliant, in its way—satisfies many of us as an answer, but might not satisfy the design critic in search of a direct parallel to, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Milton Glaser’s iconic Bob Dylan poster.

Typography, architecture, and web design

The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression. Stick around and I’ll tell you which site design is like Helvetica.

Architecture (the kind that uses steel and glass and stone) is also an apt comparison—or at least, more apt than poster design. The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.

Of course, all comparisons are gnarly by nature. What is the “London Calling” of television? Who is the Jane Austen of automotive design? Madame Butterfly is not less beautiful for having no car chase sequence, peanut butter no less tasty because it cannot dance.

SO WHAT IS WEB DESIGN?

Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for. Although websites can be delivery systems for games and videos, and although those delivery systems can be lovely to look at, such sites are exemplars of game design and video storytelling, not of web design. So what is web design?

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Let’s repeat that, with emphasis:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY

Great web designs are like great typefaces: some, like Rosewood, impose a personality on whatever content is applied to them. Others, like Helvetica, fade into the background (or try to), magically supporting whatever tone the content provides. (We can argue tomorrow whether Helvetica is really as neutral as water.)

Which web design is like that? For one, Douglas Bowman’s white “Minima” layout for Blogger, used by literally millions of writers—and it feels like it was designed for each of them individually. That is great design.

Great web designs are like great buildings. All office buildings, however distinctive, have lobbies and bathrooms and staircases. Websites, too, share commonalities.

Although a great site design is completely individual, it is also a great deal like other site designs that perform similar functions. The same is true of great magazine and newspaper layouts, which differ from banal magazine and newspaper layouts in a hundred subtle details. Few celebrate great magazine layouts, yet millions consciously or unconsciously appreciate them, and nobody laments that they are not posters.

The inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful designer complains that too many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are “boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs.

The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.

[Source] https://alistapart.com/article/understandingwebdesign/

 Jaspal Khalsa - Web Designer in Navi Mumbai. 7+ year’s experience of Web Design and Logo Design Services. Develop user http://jaspalkhalsa.com/web-design.html friendly and Responsive website from expert at affordable cost. I am expert to create integrated design that fills a need.

[webanalytics]

How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working

Content is king.

And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.

Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.

It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.

Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.

“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin

Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.

Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.

Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.

Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.

Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.

How do you know when you’re not doing that?

Look for these five red flags before and during the push.

Content Marketing 101

But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.

If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.

What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.

How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.

Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.

In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.

Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.

Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:

Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.

Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.

Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.

The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson

And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.

How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?

Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.

Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up

Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.

Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.

That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?

Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.

So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.

Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.

A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.

That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.

Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.

Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.

If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:

Identify your most profitable customers.

Identify those who refer within that group.

Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.

Create a customer persona based on that data.

That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.

Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.

If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.

The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.

Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.

Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile

Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.

And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.

Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.

Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?

It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.

However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.

Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.

To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.

Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.

For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:

Majestic

Ahrefs

Moz

SEMrush

Bing Webmaster Tools

If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.

If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.

The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.

Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.

If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.

Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing

Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?

Great content gets shared.

If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.

This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.

Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.

We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.

Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.

First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.

Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.

If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.

“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina

More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:

Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.

Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.

Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?

Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.

Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.

Ask them to share. Remind them to share.

Use compelling visuals.

Create evergreen content.

Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.

None, few, or lots, more are better.

Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content

This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.

It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.

The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.

But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.

Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.

“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk

If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.

Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?

Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.

Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do

Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.

But all leads are not created equal.

Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.

Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.

If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.

If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.

In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.

Everything else is just noise.

“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” ~Doug Kessler

Conclusion

No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:

Fix your topic(s).

Fix your amplification and promotion.

Fix your format(s).

Fix your creators.

But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.

The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.

It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.

Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2CvAwSv #Digital #Analytics #Website