Convergence

Resources From The Leftist Feminist Philosopher

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

Baby freaking monsters!

how dare they be this adorable!

Let’s start with my favorite potential feature of capitalism- the virtuous cycle. The heart of the concept is this: I pay much higher wages and my workers spend more money. Other businesses then have more sales because of those higher wages so more people buy what I sell than before. My competitors will need to raise their wages to compete for labor resources which raises the standard for my industry. Adjacent industries now feel the same pressure to raise wages. The more the wages increase, the more spending increases and therefore profits. In other words the more a market pays in wages, the more it makes in sales. People have been sickened by Bezos’s outrageous wealth, but he would be drastically more prosperous if he paid Amazon’s tens of thousands of low level employees twice as much. It seems paradoxical by today’s standards, but one-hundred years ago this was understood as a verified truth (source).

Next we have the concept of using minimum wage as an equalizer. Various cities around the country have raised their minimum wage to double or higher the national minimum. In each case there was turmoil, instability, and then prosperity. It always ended up benefiting the economy. Why? The virtuous cycle. However, those wages will never remain a “living wage” because the structure and culture of our economy. Given time, minimum wage will always be the wage of the poor. The average cost of goods and services rises to meet minimum wage and so it is a poor instrument for creating economic equality in the long term.

Why does minimum wage kick off the virtuous cycle, but not sustain it? There are a few reasons. Number one: it isn’t a cultural change, it is a legal one. In these situations, businesses didn’t choose to raise wages because they saw it as a wise and ethical decision. They didn’t pay their workers more because it was the new standard for their industry. They did it because the government forced them to. The same culture that allowed those companies to comfortably pay workers so little they had to get food stamps to survive will eventually level the playing field back in their favor.

When a business exists to make money, it will never be as successful as a business that aspires to deliver value. I’ve worked in the corporate world for 20 years now, and what I have seen in every corporation I have worked for is that profits are the reason they exist, regardless of what principles they were founded under. I’ve worked for Marriott, Ikea, McDonalds, Pepsico, and Panasonic (among others). Each one of those companies has a policy of putting employees and customers first, and none of them live up to it. Leadership pushes down mandates to increase productivity and therefore profits. Every medium or larger corporation I have worked for squeezes profit from the business by exploiting their labor force and restricting or eliminating spending on things like infrastructure, process improvement, and non-iterative innovation. My experience was even the same when I was in the US Army. This allows companies to make more and more money while their employees make the same wages or, in the case of economic downturns, less. Eventually the lack of innovation and poor infrastructure requires the company to sell or go under, but the people on top have already taken what they want and left, or they make out like bandits in the sale.

The culture of our economy is the enemy. It puts value on “job creators” as if they are somehow doing you a favor by employing you. Most likely, they are taking your labor and selling it for much much more than they are paying you. That isn’t a favor, it is exploitation. Your business should be profitable, but when the labor of a worker generates $100/hour in sales and you pay them $7 for that labor, the relationship is heinously one-sided. Strangely enough, people resent the few industries who do make a living wage: electricians, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, etc. They are not overpaid, they are paid fairly. They seem overpaid because our culture conditions us to accept the more common, and more meager, salaries the rest of us make.

What is the way forward? There isn’t a single solution to the problem, it will require a series of systemic changes. The importance of unions cannot be overstated when discussing wages. Ethics and sustainability need to become more than buzzwords for marketing departments. Workers need to understand their rights and be aware of how much money their labor generates. Finally, and most importantly, we need to change our culture’s implicit association of wealth with worth.

Probably the only original Superhero I invented is Angela, whom I created for Spawn and who I had a legal case with Spawn publisher Todd Mcfarlane about his refusal to pay royalties on any of the books I'd written. Todd lost the court case, lost his appeal (in ways that actually wound up doing really good things for creators in copyright cases), and eventually (after another Todd court hearing about the characters he'd created that were ripoffs of the ones I'd created for him, that found that they were rip-offs and he owed me for them as well, and many years of bankruptcy) wound up trading Angela for the other characters I'd created for him.

I sold Angela to Marvel, and gave the money to charity, and was reminded why I don't really create original Superheroes. Publishers have spent eighty years cheating artists and writers out of their creations. (Look up the history of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Superman if you want to be made sad.)

Today's example is: Phylactery

In d&d:

In real life

That's right. they named the evil artifact that the evil undead spellcaster hides their soul in after a Jewish ceremonial object.

when you come across that you should at the table paralyzed wondering

Do my fellow players know this is anti-Semitic?

If they don't know and I bring it up will they be mad at me for ruining the fun?

If they do know and I bring it up will revealing myself as Jewish be dangerous?

TB Choi

When we talk about market concentration in entertainment, we often default to the most visibly concentrated elements: one movie theater chain, four movie studios, one cable operator and one telco per region, five tech giants.

But there’s another - incredibly salient - form of concentration that’s invisible unless you’re actually in the industry: consolidation in the talent agencies.

Private equity-backed rollups have turned a wild jungle of hundreds of agents and agencies into a manicured, ornamental hedge of four mega-agencies: WME, CAA, UTA and ICM.

Private equity is the most predatory form of capitalism extant, the end-product of generations of looters who distanced the financial economy from the real economy, until the best way to make money is to destroy real value.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

And when these eminently guillotinable wreckers took over the talent agencies, the got control over a critical bottleneck in entertainment production, the funnel that all creative laborers move through en route to production. Having control over a bottleneck, they SQUEEZED.

The agencies started creating “packaging deals”: when you hire a writer, they also find you a director, lead actors, and so on. And they skim a “packaging fee” off the top of the production, in addition to the commissions they earn from their clients.

This is a massive conflict of interest. Agencies could (tacitly) offer studios lower compensation for their clients in exchange for higher fees. The talent got less, the studios paid less, and the agencies made more.

The arts are a bizarre labor market, because people make art even in the absence of a rational expectation of return - arts production is motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

When Samuel Johnson said “None but a blockhead ever wrote but for money,” it was pure aspiration. Not even Johnson himself ever lived up to that standard!

This gives rise to highly exploitative relationships, where unscrupulous middle-men can charge money to artists for access to audiences (or even the promise of access, never delivered upon).

Predatory “vanity publishers,” fake agents, and other grifters have bankrupted many a would-be artist.

To counter this tendency, writers are advised to stick to a rule of thumb that “money flows towards the artist.”

That is, your publisher makes money from your creation, not fees you pay for publication. Your agent makes money from commissions on the publisher’s royalties, not from a service charge to you.

Publishers and agents should NEVER have side-deals that incentivize agents to accept less for you. This is incredibly obvious: agents argue your side in a negotiation with an entertainment company. They can’t ALSO be working FOR the entertainment company.

Duh.

I mean… DUH.

So when the big agencies started doing this packaging thing, writers got pissed. What’s more, screenwriters are unionized, represented by (among others), the WGA. And they told the agents, fuck no, no way, cut this shit out.

And the private equity bosses running the agencies said fuck off, what are you all gonna do, fire your agents?

So every WGA member fired their agents.

That was in April 2018!

Most of the mid-sized agencies caved. But the action dragged on for YEARS, seemingly with no end in sight.

Then, last month, UTA caved.

And now, ICM has surrendered.

https://www.wga.org/members/membership-information/wga-agency-campaign/agency-campaign-update-agreement-with-icm

That just leaves CAA (who used to rep me) and WME (who currently do) as holdouts, still involved in both the labor action and an endless, slow-motion lawsuit.

This is a huge victory for the writers, but it’s not really clear what’ll happen next.

For one thing, there are all the writers who fired their agents and hired managers, went to mid-sized agencies, or used lawyers to rep them – will they go back?

Then there are writers like me: not in the Guild, but with enough option deals to need a screen agent.

As I understand it, if I ever get signed on to adapt any of my work on a union production, I’ll have to join the Guild to work on it, and that means firing the agent who got the deal. It’s a pretty weird situation!

And for the record, my agent is a hardworking, lovely person who gets my work and is great to work with. She’s not a private equity baron.

I’m at CAA, and I’m Writers Guild. I’ve fired my agents when it comes to representing me as a screenwriter. They still represent me as an individual: if you want to buy the film or TV rights to one of my books, for example, you’d go to CAA. But they don’t represent me and don’t get a commission for my screenwriting any longer.