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uziq wrote:

amazon hasn't really affected the publishing industry. they decimated booksellers and bookstores, brick-and-mortars. yes, publishers have to enter into a compact with the devil with them, and pretty much dance to their tune, but it's afforded as many opportunities (reach being the main one in lieu of massive marketing budgets) as drawbacks. my criticism of amazon is the same criticism as any sort of platform capitalism, in which companies are underwritten by huge investment and operate at massive losses for 5-10 years, playing the long-game. it's uncompetitive and creates oligopolies.

the original prediction, that amazon and ebooks would smash publishing to smithereens, has been disproven. ebooks sales are falling and print is actually back up. publishers quickly signed deals with amazon to sell their ebooks on kindle, which are, suffice to say, massively profitable compared to actually producing physical print (and actually pay more to authors as a percentage of total revenue).

sorry but that's 2-for-2 you've tried to catch me out as a hypocrite and failed utterly.

can you now explain why poles are bad?

Ah, so you're against Amazon on principle, the actual impact is irrelevant.
I'll bet publishing as a whole is dramatically less profitable now, and as you say many booksellers have gone to the wall.

Looks like Amazon has fucked it TBH

uziq wrote:

yeah in this case it was a bunch of self-employed/small business owners, who fleece the state their tax and write off as much as possible for deductions, small business owners being given immense tax privileges by the govt (to say nothing of the casual fadging of work, nicking and reselling of building supplies, ripping off old people, etc) complaining vociferously about new tradespeople from poland or the czech republic or whatever coming over and competing for the same work.

these people live the life of riley. bricklayers in london making nearly £100k a year. and they’ve all got rolled up copies of The Sun or the Daily Mail on the dashes of their white vans, decrying this that and the other about foreigners.

it’s the worst sort of blue-collar, the jay brand attitudes that only want to look after their own narrow self-interest and have all sorts of unreconstructed negative views about anyone different (that goes for your favourites, homosexuals, as much as it does about anyone else; in fact they’re probably as suspicious of people who don’t like football as anything else). i’m pretty sure that this sort of on-the-make tradesman would utterly balk at the idea of paying more tax to found an NHS, if it was proposed for the first time today.

but dilbert will gloss it as ‘people were mad about poles’. the people, that is, who would refuse to take labourer work picking fruits or vegetables for the wages those jobs command; the people who would rather sit on their arses and expect welfare, taking more interest in x factor than national politics; the people who just want to protect their own small businesses from any sort of competition. these people who buy cheap food, cheap clothes, and enjoy every other convenience because of the exact same international labour market. pity the poor natives!

there’s a great book by richard hoggart, very influential piece of 20th century sociology, called ‘the uses of literacy’. it’s not really about education or literacy per se, it’s about the social attitudes and values, the ‘class consciousness’ if you will, of the working class, historically and now. he talks a lot about the attitudes in the northern industrial towns of workers towards owners, workers towards each other, etc. it’s incredibly insightful. the whole culture of slightly bodging the job and having a few pallets of that fancy tile for yourself to sell down the pub, etc. and then some populist-brown noser like dilbert comes along and makes out ‘the people’ to be these victims, assailed by barbarians from without. yeah fucking right. bearing in mind he’s the same guy who will encourage jay to move somewhere else and take action. but the white brit is supposed to be preserved like some non-migratory bird on a reserve.

Wow you really despise the working class don't you?

Jay has expressed dissatisfaction with his situation and espoused the ideology of getting up and moving, I've advised him to do so, that is all.

The average Brit, who you so despise. has expressed dissatisfaction with having their borders thrown open, their standard of living falling, their suburbs being overrun by people who aren't like them and who commit crimes and rape their kids. They've voted for Brexit and installed a populist PM who has promised Brexit and more. Why shouldn't they seek to preserve themselves?
That the people could be so stupid, uneducated and anti-progressive completely blindsided you and your fellow 'intellectuals' to the point you still can't grasp what happened.

I've done plenty of manual work, and still do, its how the _X millions were made.

sorry, let's keep with poles for a second.

how did polish immigration:

(i) cause the standard of living to fall (it didn't, least of all for tradespeople and people in competing industries; and when it comes to cheap groceries and supermarket food, migrant labour ENSURED the cheap cost of living, derp);

(ii) over-run english suburbs with people who aren't like them (can i see some population distribution stats? some of the strongest anti-immigrant rhetoric and returned votes in the brexit referendum came from areas like the south wales valleys, those areas infamous for their massive polish populations, aye);

(iii) commit crimes and rape kids (where's the polish crime infestation?)

hoovering up the walnut shells in your mum's house as a means of contributing to bed and board isn't manual labour, sorry pal.

Dilbert_X wrote:

No, lets look at the disrupted industries besides publishing you've whined about.

so now you're telling me what my own beliefs and motivations are, haha. now that's a hard argument to win.

a large part of my formulated post about amazon was informed by reading such as nick srnicek’s 'platform capitalism'. for the same reason, i don't use facebook or any of their affiliated services. sorry but trying to make out i don't like amazon because they've ruined publishers (they haven't, once again, and in any case i'm not even in trade publishing anymore relying upon retail sales) is a poor line to take. please try again.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-15 05:19:03)

allowing for some variation in how a publishing house can use its size and total list to negotiate, amazon ask for about 40% of a book's cover price. a retailer will ask for 30%. the publisher sets the initial price, it is not dictated by amazon. the retailer can also return any number of books at any time and expect a total refund. amazon orders are satisfied directly from a publisher's distributor; the publisher can effectively sell directly with none of the risk of miscalculated print runs and inopportune remaindering, knocking an annual budget out of joint. having 300 copies of a consignment of 800 books be sent back from a major retailer, 12 months after the first payments were taken and expecting a full refund, can be a serious pain for a small-to-medium-sized publisher when multiplied across their entire catalogue. a publisher can link their entire catalogue to amazon and sell it there, whereas with booksellers they have to compete and cajole with everyone else in the industry to get a place on a very limited retail bookshelf.

but please tell me more 'how you're sure' about an industry you know nothing about.

once again, many things affect the performance of book sales in any given year. book crazes come and go and massively inflate the stats (i'm sure global book sales dropped off after a harry potter or a game of thrones petered out; are you interpreting those dips as signs of amazon 'stripping' the industry?), distorting the picture. inflation, recession, new technological developments and short term bubbles, etc. all have an effect. none of this you can be expected to know about and track in any detail; but do stop lecturing me, whose business it is, or at least was, to know.

maybe you should just address the topic at hand instead of trying to find cracks in my integrity?

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-15 05:35:49)

self-publishing seldom, if at all, affects the sales of publishing houses. you have a new ecology in effect of amateur writers who would never get commissioned by a publishing house (i routinely rejected tonnes of them), using new tech to put their ebooks directly on the amazon marketplace. great if you're into poorly written fan-fiction or soft-core porn.

the market share of the big 5 going down could be as much a sign of health as decline; why is it desirable that huge corporate conglomerates take up all of the profits from both leading and first-time authors? book stores, today more than ever, are full of great and diverse books from many independent publishers, including – and this is genuinely a new development – lots of translated fiction from abroad, again funded by smaller specialist publishers. as i said above, a good number of the major book prizes in recent years – some of the main drivers of book sales, year on year – have been from small, independent presses like fitzcarraldo. not big 5. this is A Good Thing, for writers and book-buying readers both, not a portentous omen.

(ironically, this is also in part thanks to amazon: before booksellers with all the valuable shelf-space would be notoriously conservative, and wouldn't take risks on foreign or smaller presses. now they have found a new niche as purveyors of 'specialist' literature.)

as the link says, ebooks are in decline, yes, and their original trumpeting as the 'end of print and publishers' was much oversold. i just said this above.

the link also states

If print is indeed is “back,” it’s because of Amazon.

which is, hey, exactly what i said: if anything, publishers are grateful to amazon, and its mixed blessings, than spiteful about it. so remind me why i'd be hyper-critical of amazon again if the site has been a large driver of the growth, such as it exists, in the continued sale of print?

the link's main thrust is that booksellers, not publishers, are losing. major chains like barnes and noble are losing to amazon. this is all exactly as i have said above: booksellers disrupted, publishers still taking the same sales (modest growth, in fact), as before.

wowsers!!! i have to say, dilbert, i never thought you'd take me up on an argument specifically on my own industry. this is a new leap for you. quick! go do some more hasty google searching! i'm sure you can find some figures or statistics somewhere which you can interpret to confirm your own ignorance, or a sufficiently negative take on a blog somewhere if you stuff the google search with enough adjectives!

i'll wait for you to address the point above about poles ruining the UK. as it stands, i'm pretty sure you're just justifying xenophobia of the most boring kind. but hey, i'm snooty about working-class people bla bla bla. meanwhile your generalisations are completely unsupported?

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-15 06:13:31)

uziq wrote:

i'm not going to respect someone for subjecting themselves to body-breaking labour. very few tradespeople want their own kids to go into it.

Oh God is this so true. I have never met a single auto technician who wanted their kids to become auto techs. One of the techs I knew was so proud of the fact that his kid joined the military and is now a Presidential Honor Guard. He rather his kid take a soldiers salary to hold a flag for Trump than to make $100,000ish a year putting transmissions together.

This is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest more people get into the trades. Few people in the trades would suggest such a thing.

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

uziq wrote:

i'm not going to respect someone for subjecting themselves to body-breaking labour. very few tradespeople want their own kids to go into it.

Oh God is this so true. I have never met a single auto technician who wanted their kids to become auto techs. One of the techs I knew was so proud of the fact that his kid joined the military and is now a Presidential Honor Guard. He rather his kid take a soldiers salary to hold a flag for Trump than to make $100,000ish a year putting transmissions together.

This is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest more people get into the trades. Few people in the trades would suggest such a thing.

It's one of those grass is always greener things coupled with persistent snobbery from insecure people like uzi. They don't realize that by entering the white collar workforce their kids will be making half what they're making.

The jobs aren't that physically demanding anymore. There are lifts and machines and slings and apprentices for heavy lifting. Insecurity is a bitch.

Agreed mostly. I think white collar work is much more stable than blue collar though. I can take my education and do any number of different things into my 70's. Blue collar workers are one work related back injury away from Social Security Disability or a 1911 in the mouth though.

While I don't think highly of the people in those professions, I do respect the work they do. I think working is generally good for people mentally. As long as that work is meaningfully compensated. I am okay with fast food workers making more money for instance something my better off than me sister nurse is deeply opposed to. I think it is a fair deal that if you work at least 40 hours a week, you shouldn't have to worry about your healthcare or homelessness.

I don't miss being bossed around by ignorant slobs who got the job based off being able to impress another ignorant slob. School admins may get their jobs through nepotism but at least I am sure these people are better educated and more knowledgeable about the profession than I am. I can live with a lower place in a hierarchy if I know the people above me deserve to be there. If that makes any sense.

i can deal with being paid an OK salary if i’m surrounded by colleagues who are engaged with literature, culture, politics, discourse. it’s enriching and enlivening. people with their own side hustles, hobbies, artistic projects. interesting people to know. i doubt there’s quite so much of that sort of thing on building sites.

i prefer to hang around people who don’t spend every evening in front of their 60 inch flat screen TV. i prefer people who don’t own a TV. that the other half live that way is fine with me, but i’m not envious about it.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I don't miss being bossed around by ignorant slobs who got the job based off being able to impress another ignorant slob. School admins may get their jobs through nepotism but at least I am sure these people are better educated and more knowledgeable about the profession than I am. I can live with a lower place in a hierarchy if I know the people above me deserve to be there. If that makes any sense.

I felt the same way in the army. I hate working for people when I'm significantly smarter.

Teachers have really done the country a disservice by telling every smart kid to go off to college while scoffing at people going into the trades.

uziq wrote:

do teachers really do that, or is that just another convenient trope you picked up from right-wing commentary sites? delivering angel-headed babies into the black maws of postmodern cultural relativists on campuses, right? oh this is a fun game!!!

No, it's pretty universal here. The college bound are put up on a pedestal and treated like gold. Those destined for the trades are expected to come out of the bottom tiers academically.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I don't miss being bossed around by ignorant slobs who got the job based off being able to impress another ignorant slob. School admins may get their jobs through nepotism but at least I am sure these people are better educated and more knowledgeable about the profession than I am. I can live with a lower place in a hierarchy if I know the people above me deserve to be there. If that makes any sense.

I felt the same way in the army. I hate working for people when I'm significantly smarter.

Teachers have really done the country a disservice by telling every smart kid to go off to college while scoffing at people going into the trades.

I don't think individual teachers did that as much as the education finance/capital machine convinced middle class boomers to create a system that pushes their derpy kids into higher education. Teachers are well aware which kids are not college material and which ones are at risk of 27 clubbing it.

Have you ever heard of the "4-14 window" Evangelicals in education and home schooling discuss? You are a dad now and that might be relevant to you. I am not trolling. It is an interesting concept from them that I think has a lot of merit.

No, but it makes sense. It's probably why children's services away from the main service became so popular. I remember when I was a kid I used to harass my dad about not being a believer or going to church. My grandparents were pretty hardcore born-agains and raised me to be one, right up until they retired to Florida when I was in 5th grade. After that I became an atheist. Now I'm just apathetic.