Pixel Scroll 6/16/16 Schroedinger’s Kzin

(1) ARM-WRESTLING WITH A PUBLISHER. Kristine Kathryn Rusch sees writers as too prone to follow rules, and too prone to think themselves as powerless in the face of contractual language: “Business Musings: Thus, Lawyers, and Writers (Contracts/Dealbreakers)”.

Lawyers aren’t afraid of thugs and goons and cartoon characters that go bump in the night. They’re not afraid of someone who plays the Big Dog and says, You’ll never work in this town again. Lawyers generally say, Well, let’s see.

Lawyers know there’s usually a solution—and it’s often as simple as standing up and saying to the person on the other side of the contract, I’m not playing your silly game. No. I’m not doing it. Now, what are you going to do?

…. Here’s the bottom line, people. I know a bunch of you are stuck in contracts you don’t like. Publishers are reinterpreting contracts in whole new ways, ways that they never looked at in the past.

The big shift is that publishers no longer see themselves as manufacturers and distributers of books. They’re running a rights management business, which means taking advantage of the full copyright on a property, instead of licensing a tiny part of that copyright. (If you don’t understand that sentence, get a copy of the Copyright Handbook. If you’re too damn lazy or cheap to do that, at least see this blog post of mine.)

(2) ATWOOD. “Margaret Atwood awarded 2016 PEN Pinter Prize”.

Canadian poet, novelist and environmental activist Margaret Atwood has been awarded the 2016 PEN Pinter Prize. She will receive her award at a public event at the British Library on the evening of Thursday 13 October, where she will deliver an address.

Margaret Atwood was chosen by this year’s judges Vicky Featherstone, Zia Haider Rahman, Peter Stothard, Antonia Fraser and President of English PEN and Chair of Judges, Maureen Freely.

The judges praised Atwood as a ‘consistent supporter of political causes’, adding ‘her work championing environmental concerns comes well within the scope of human rights … she is a very important figure in terms of the principles of PEN and of Harold Pinter’.

Atwood said:

I am humbled to be the recipient of the 2016 PEN Pinter Prize. I knew Harold Pinter and worked with him – he wrote the scenario for the film version of The Handmaid’s Tale, back in 1989 – and his burning sense of injustice at human rights abuses and the repression of artists was impressive even then. Any winner of such an award is a stand-in for the thousands of people around the world who speak and act against such abuses. I am honoured to be this year’s stand-in.

(3) GUY WITH A GUN. Bruce Arthurs wrote about this army experience in 2012 after the Aurora theater shooting, and it’s relevant again this week: “Shots In The Dark, or, How I Became A Sharpshooter”.

Several ammo clips later, I and the other trainees have finished the Night Firing exercise and gather around to get our scores. I get a high score.  I get a surprisingly high score.  I get an astonishingly high score, far above the type of scores I’d gotten during daytime firing exercises.  I get a score so high that suddenly I’ve moved up into Sharpshooter-level numbers. That Holy Shit guy?  He skunked it.  Didn’t hit a single target. Well, let’s revise that statement, because it doesn’t take much time or brains to figure out what happened.  In the dark, with everyone firing around him, with multiple targets and multiple dim flashes, he’d gotten his orientation just slightly off and had been shooting at the wrong target.  The target of the guy next to him.  At my target.

(4) HOWARD TAYLER’S TAKE ON GUN OWNERSHIP.

(5) FIRST FIFTH. Joe Sherry continues his series at Nerds of a Feather with “Reading the Hugos: Novel”. Number five on his ballot is: The Aeronaut’s Windlass:

Butcher’s novel is the only finalist not on my nomination ballot. Prior to last year, I was completely unfamiliar with Butcher’s work. I knew that it existed, but until Skin Game‘s nomination, I had never read anything Butcher wrote. Happily, Skin Game was a solid read and one that I vastly preferred over the eventual winner, The Three-Body Problem. The Aeronaut’s Windlass is the first volume in a steampunk epic fantasy series from Butcher. I like it more than Skin Game, and I’m happy to be getting in on the ground floor of the series rather than jumping in at Book 15 like I did with the Dresden Files. The setting was fantastic (airships and insanely tall towers), but what drew me in was the characters. Gwen, Benedict, Brother Vincent, Bridget Tagwynn, Rowl, Captain Grimm, and pretty much everyone across the board are what sold me on this book. These are characters I would love to spent more time with.

This is one of those spots on my ballot that I could realistically swap positions with the next one up. I think Seveneves is an overall a better book, but I enjoyed The Aeronaut’s Windlass just about as much as I did Seveneves, just in different ways. They are two very different sorts of novels, and I’m down for more of Butcher’s Cinder Spires series, but Seveneves gets the nod today.

Sherry’s first installment was – “Watching the Hugos: Dramatic Presentation Long Form”.

(6) CONCLUSION OF FROZEN SKY. “Jeff Carlson has finished his Frozen Sky trilogy and the third book is by far the biggest and most ambitious of the 3 books,” reports Carl Slaughter. Frozen Sky 3: Blindsided was released June 11.
Carl interviewed Jeff in 2014 for Diabolical Plots. He was nominated for the John Campbell and Philip Dick awards and has been published in Asimov’s.

The aliens in The Frozen Sky are intelligent, but they look a bit like squids, they don’t speak and they don’t have sight. Why not bipedal aliens like Vulcans or Klingons or Romulans with vocal cords and eyes?

Because I’m not constrained by a production budget! Ha. “Let’s glue some ears on him. We’ll glue some forehead thingies on them. Okay, we’re done.”

Star Trek is good fun but limited in presentation. That’s the beauty of being a novelist. The medium requires the reader’s imagination. Yes, I direct the action, but hard sf readers are smart readers. They want to be strangers in a strange land. So I can say, well, I have this claustrophobic three-dimensional low-gravity environment like the mazes of an ant farm inside Europa’s icy crust. What would kind of creatures would evolve here? Six-foot-tall bipedal creatures like people? Heck no.

Jeff’s other series is the Plague series.

(7) GREAT GHOSTBUSTERS POSTER.

(8) EARLY WRITING. Jami Gray gets a great interview — “Hugo award winner, Seanan McGuire visits with latest InCryptid novel!”

Many writers have that first novel which will never see the light of day. Out of curiosity, do you have one stashed somewhere? Inquiring minds want to know: what was your first attempt at writing and how old were you?

My first serious attempt at writing was a fourteen-page essay when I was nine, explaining to my mother why she had to let me read Stephen King. It had footnotes and a bibliography. I finished my first book when I was twelve. It was called Dracula’s Castle, and if I knew where it was, I’d probably put it online.

(9) MORE STORIES. Editor Glenn Hauman’s Indiegogo appeal to fund the Altered States of the Union anthology has an update – “We’re annexing new territory!”

The response to the concept behind Altered States has inspired a lot of authors to join in the fun, so we’re proud to announce we’re expanding the book by almost 60%, adding new stories by:

  • Russ Colchamiro
  • Peter David
  • Keith R.A. DeCandido
  • Robert Greenberger
  • Meredith Peruzzi
  • Aaron Rosenberg
  • David Silverman & Hildy Silverman
  • Anne Toole

(10) A BOOKSTORE NEAR YOU. Dutch writer Thomas Olde Heuvelt will be on a book tour in the US in June and July, courtesy of TOR. The trip includes three appearances in California, including an LA-vicinity stop at Dark Delicacies Bookstore in Burbank on the evening of Tuesday, July 19.

TOH-US-Tour-2016

(11) MEDIA STRATEGY. Vox Day’s tells followers at Vox Popoli that his new philosophy is “Don’t talk to the media!”

In light of my ridiculous experience with Wired and after seeing how multiple media outlets turned to George RR Martin and John Scalzi to ask them to interpret my actions, I now turn down most media requests. I do so literally every week; I just turned down two yesterday alone. The media is not in the business of reporting the news, they are in the business of selling their masters’ Narrative.

(12) A MAD GENIUS ON THE HUGOS. Kate Paulk devotes half of “Hugo Awards – The Nominee Highlights – Best Fanzine” to criticizing Gregory Benford’s intention to vote for Steve Stiles in the Best Fan Artist category. Yet his reasons for supporting Stiles — Steve’s years of accomplishment as a cartoonist — parallel my reasons for voting for Toni Weisskopf as Best Pro Editor in 2015.

(13) PRINCE OF TIDES, THE GREAT SANTINI. George R.R. Martin urges readers to donate:

Pat [Conroy] passed away in March… but his books will live on, and so will his memory. In his memory, his family has now establishing a Pat Conroy Literary Center in his beloved home town of Beaufort, South Carolina. You can read about it here: http://patconroyliterarycenter.org/ A worthy project, I think. I’ll be donating. I urge all of you who love good writing to do the same.

(14) LOOKING FOR LAUGHS? The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog is enthusiastic about Joe Zieja’s humorous Mechanical Failure.

Comedy is a tricky beast, especially in science fiction. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is unquestionably a towering achievements of the form, but after than, opinions vary wildly (we’d wager John Scalzi has equal numbers of fans who either want him to stop trying to be funny, or to stop writing books that are so serious). It’s rare in genre to find a book that can do satire without being preachy, comedy without being entirely silly (not that a little silliness is a bad thing), and still manage toss a little “science fiction” into the mix. Joe Zieja’s debut novel, Mechanical Failure (the first part of the Epic Fail trilogy, which gives you a hint as to what you’re in for) makes as good a bid as we’ve seen in quite some time, diving headfirst into full-on military SF parody and making it look easy.

(15) UPJOHN OUTPACED BY REALITY? Alexandra Erin’s facing a challenge that reminds me of the one Garry Trudeau faced while producing Doonesbury during the Watergate era — it’s hard to be more absurd than real life.

Mr. Upjohn’s post-con report from WisCon is still forthcoming; it’s evolved and grown a few times since the con actually ended as I took reality onboard , which once again has made parody seem tame. When actual flesh and blood con attendants are decrying the “dystopian” tape lines designating travel lanes on the crowded party floor, I clearly need to step up the game.

Meanwhile, Erin writes, “I’d really love to close out my WorldCon fundraiser” – still needs $375.

(16) CHANGE OF ADDRESS. Juliette Wade has ported her TalkToYoUniverse content to her Dive Into Worldbuilding site.

Introducing the Dive into Worldbuilding Workshop at Patreon!

Dive into Worldbuilding started in 2011 – five years ago – when Google+ introduced their hangouts feature and I decided it would be fun to hang out with fellow writers and talk about worldbuilding. Since then, it has grown and changed, from just a bunch of friends meeting online with no record except my written summaries, to a meeting that got recorded and sent to YouTube, to a show featuring a wide variety of guest authors as well as regular topic discussions. With each change, my goal has been to reach a wider variety of interesting people, listen to more interesting views on worldbuilding, and share insights with as many people as possible.

Today, I’m taking it a step further with the Dive into Worldbuilding Patreon – which is also the Dive into Worldbuilding Workshop.

This Patreon will do more than just support my research into panel topics. It will help me to pay my guest authors for their time and expertise – but it will also let me help more of you.

(17) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 16, 1816 — At the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests—Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori—and challenges each guest to write a ghost story, which culminates in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness.

[Thanks to Petréa Mitchell, Vincent Docherty, Michael J. Walsh, Carl Slaughter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

191 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/16/16 Schroedinger’s Kzin

  1. @Stoic Cynic–

    The means to make McVeigh’s truck bomb have been widely and easily available to Americans for more than my lifetime, and moreover commonly used to blow things up. Mostly inconvenient tree stumps, but also for the sheer hell of it, in rural areas. So it’s not like people haven’t been able to make bombs.

    Yet somehow, it’s not as widely popular as a means of mayhem as guns are. Even when I was in college and bomb threats were a routine occurrence, they were virtually always threats, not bombs. At a time when actual bombings were more common than they are now!

    And the paranoia and religious faith in guns as our main bulwark against tyranny is not a thing apart from the NRA; it is a thing actively promoted by the NRA, and a major change from my kid years, my teens, even my twenties and thirties.

    So, please, give it a rest. We can do something about gun violence, if we stop kowtowing to the NRA–starting with funding real epidemiological research, no matter how much the nuts and fanatics screech.

  2. @Liz Carey

    So, please, give it a rest

    And yet I’ve proposed a very specific and minimal legal change that gets to roughly where you say you want to get. I think it would have some efficacy but not at the level you believe. I think it would also be difficult to pass and other solutions would be more effective. It is also likely to harden the political divide that makes it difficult to pass in the first place.

    Bottom line though: I disagree so I should just shut up? Good to know. It’s easier to wave the bloody shirt than suggest complex problems need multi-pronged solutions isn’t it?

    And, Hampus, disagreement does not equal lying.

    But of course anyone disagreeing is acting in bad faith and shouldn’t speak. How uplifting and enlightening!

  3. Stoic Cynic:

    When all studies say the exact opposite of what you say, it has passed dishonesty and willfull ignorance and gone over to lying.

    Every person is entitled to their own opionion, but not to their own facts.

  4. @Hampus Eckerman

    Many of the studies you pointed to fall into correlation = causation territory and I could point out unconsidered factors. I’m not going to argue it further though. I brought myself back into this discussion against my better judgment. It’s time to follow that better judgment.

  5. I’m curious what “unconsidered factors” would account for the fact that when the Israeli Army stopped allowing their soldiers to take home their guns on the weekend suicide rates among adolescents fell 40%. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21034205. Same population, same culture, one change: lower access to guns over the weekend. Note that the weekday suicide rate did NOT change.

  6. @Stoic Cynic: I do not agree with those premises but it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not. It’s a mindset that’s out there and politics is the art of the possible. Those are the folks that give the NRA its political power. You need to either convince those folks your not planning on seizing their guns or massively outnumber their political engagement. All while hoping you don’t further radicalize them into a whole contingent of McVeigh’s.

    Bernie Sanders represents a rural state. His circumspection, re: gun control is an outgrowth of that fact. He knows his constituents and would like to keep his job.

    For effective action you’d do better to push for other social reforms at the federal level while pushing gun reform at the local level where there is at least a chance of passage. It’s the social reforms that matter most anyways.

    Christina Grimmie’s death on June 10th, followed by the mass shooting at Pulse on the 12th, followed by the NRA’s froth froth froth may lead to some change in state law. Democrats support regulation, Republicans oppose it (and have the majority), but the state was recently obliged to redraw its districts in a way that may benefit Democrats in future elections.

    Stoic, I don’t think you’re being dishonest. There are a number of factors from the constitutional right to bear arms to the power of state governments to the longstanding and profoundly negative effect the industry has had on the terms of the discussion which make changing the law difficult. Florida is the state where Treyvon Martin was murdered just a few years ago. George Zimmerman used the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law and a blatantly racist legal system to get out of jail.

    This is what gun control advocates have to deal with.

  7. On a personal side note, perhaps Stoic Cynic would like to explain why he’s persistently misspelling my name. It’s not hard to spell, and it’s right in front of you.

  8. @Lis Carey

    My apologies for that. Most of my posts are on my phone and I suspect autocorrect has been having it’s way. I know the right spelling but my eye must be passing right over the correction most of the time. No disrespect intended. I’ll try to keep a closer eye on it.

    It’s easier to see with some than others. Autocorrect thinks Hampus Eckerman is Halos Welshman which stands out very obviously 🙂 except when it occasionally gets it mostly right but throws a second n at the end of Eckerman.

  9. But of course anyone disagreeing is acting in bad faith and shouldn’t speak. How uplifting and enlightening!

    Yep.

  10. “Autocorrect thinks Hampus Eckerman is Halos Welshman which stands out very obviously”

    Thats not that bad! A swedish nick I had on another forum was constantly autocorrected to “Nightpotty”.

    Darren Garrison:

    Ah, a nice little piece about how you shouldn’t criticize homophobes who pay money to lobby against equal rights for homosexuals.

    EDIT: Removed unnecessary harsh language.

  11. On a more encouraging note, the American Medical Association’s recent statement on gun violence is a significant change for the organization. They’re well-positioned to work with Congress and the CDC to end the research ban.

  12. And it is of course a very good idea to, right after the Orlando shooting, post links about how we should think lobbying against equal rights for homosexuals should be seen as just one opinion among others.

    A very good idea. Not.

  13. @Stoic Cynic–

    Yes, autocorrect has a lot to answer for!

    Determinedly ignored in the Brendan Eich brouhaha is that Eich’s Prop. 8 donation was not the main reason, but merely the last straw, in Mozilla’s heavily counterculture workforce not being all that happy about working with him. And yes, the employees being unhappy enough about a CEO really can be a reason he’s not a good choice to head the company. If you have a little time, Google “Market Basket,” “good Artie,” and “bad Artie.”

  14. Oops. Wasn’t paying attention to that particular aspect of the piece–just the overall thesis that speech that dissents from the approved “correct” speech must be shut down is very much a real thing. Perhaps this would have been a better choice.

    The answer to bad speech is more speech.

  15. “Wasn’t paying attention to that particular aspect of the piece–just the overall thesis that speech that dissents from the approved “correct” speech must be shut down is very much a real thing. “

    I think XKCD has the answer to that one.

  16. @Darren: “the overall thesis that speech that dissents from the approved “correct” speech must be shut down is very much a real thing.”

    You say this of the left, as if the right doesn’t do precisely the same thing in enforcing its own orthodoxy. How droll.

  17. @Rev. Bob

    You say this of the left, as if the right doesn’t do precisely the same thing in enforcing its own orthodoxy. How droll.

    The Left shutting down dissenting speech has been a sore spot with me lately precisely because in my experience that kind of behavior comes from the opposite direction, and I don’t like that direction, generally.

    I’ve seen expressions of frustration, but nobody’s been given the boot for their right-wing views. I’ve been banned from places for my ultra-left wing opinions before (like, for instance, back in 2002 or 2003, when I claimed on a now-defunct forum run by right wingers that some Republican politicians were capitalizing on 9/11 for their own ends. Perish the thought). I haven’t seen any of that in this thread, though.

  18. @Chip: That’s stupid too. Your tome gets lost/damaged, your navigator gets killed, and everyone’s up creek sans paddle for something that isn’t even a trade secret?

    @Lee: I guess it’s possible, but I’m sure there are any number of Filers who don’t have MACII memberships but know where the Hugo packet can be obtained. You’d think someone who fancies herself an expert would keep up with these things, even if they aren’t going. Maybe she’s decided not to go after her dispiriting failure in the nominations and complete lack of support from other Puppies? Wouldn’t blame her if that was the case.

    @kathodus: Um, duh? But of course Colbert’s Law applies. You used reality, they knew you were a liberal.

  19. @lurkertype – I guess so. That moment sticks in my memory because suggesting that politicians will capitalize on a national tragedy is so utterly non-controversial to anyone who has ever spent any time in a nation containing politicians. I was stunned at the strong negative reaction to that particular claim.

  20. 9) Thanks to Lurkertype for her early support. We shall endeavor to entertain.

    11) Beale really isn’t that bright, is he? The obvious answer is to make a condition of being interviewed that he tapes the correspondence. If, after the quote appears, he wants to show context, he releases the entire interview.

    Of course, knowing him, that would quickly backfire. It would be like watching a Trump speech, but with less hair.

  21. In doing a little research on media bias and labeling, I reached out to Virginia Tech professor Jim Kuypers who has written a few books on the subject. He was kind enough to send some links to those books. He apparently discusses bias via labeling in one book in particular. FWIW. I’ll have to read it to learn more.

    Also a follow up on those t-shirts from fun.com. The Star Wars poster shirt was great. Good quality material and the right size. The Star Trek sublimated shirt ran a bit small, the material was a bit thin, but otherwise looked great. (not sure if this is the right thread, but there you go)

    @Hampus

    RE: XKCD cartoon

    I thought that the left was opposed to silencing voices as a result of personal actions. At least, that seems to be the theme when one hears about the 1950’s “Hollywood blacklist”. Or are private individuals free to pursue such shunning/”showing people the door” only when the person is a non-leftist?

    I’m all for tolerance as long as tolerance is not unidirectional.

    @Kathodus

    The idea of abusing a national tragedy for political purposes is certainlynon-controversial. It’s a well respected tradition.

    @Lis Carey

    The one criticism I have of CDC based research is that it is tied to a medical event, but does not include non-medical events. If a person pulls a gun on an approaching assailant, there is no way of recording the event as “positive” in favor of private gun ownership/use if the assailant turns and leaves the area before they get shot.

    The FBI’s crime tracking system has a further weakness in that there aren’t enough resources for local police to update the records in the event that a shooting is determined to be a lawful use of a weapon. If a citizen shoots an intruder, it will initially be coded as a crime while it is being investigated. However, that coding is rarely (if ever) updated if the prosecutor decides that the incident was a legitimate act of self defense.

    I’m a data driven guy. Very few systems (existing and proposed) seem to be designed to accurately record all gun uses.

    Regards,
    Dann

  22. @Dann: “I thought that the left was opposed to silencing voices as a result of personal actions. At least, that seems to be the theme when one hears about the 1950’s “Hollywood blacklist”. Or are private individuals free to pursue such shunning/”showing people the door” only when the person is a non-leftist?”

    Like I said to Darren:

    You say this of the left, as if the right doesn’t do precisely the same thing in enforcing its own orthodoxy. How droll.

    As for your observation that there are few systems designed to track gun use… that’s what happens when you have the NRA actively working to discourage and suppress such things. You claim to be a data-driven guy; did you factor that datum into your reasoning?

  23. Yes, the CDC studies public health questions. What exactly is your objection to researching the public health aspects of guns? And no, “it doesn’t study every possible aspect of gun use” isn’t an answer. No study of anything is able to study every possible aspect of it. That’s one reason one needs multiple studies approaching any subject from varying angles.

    The police, and FBI, and other agencies, don’t have the resources to update records, or in many cases even the legal authority to keep records, because the NRA has worked very hard to either make it illegal outright to do so, or when they can’t quite manage that, to block funding for it.

    So no, I will not take your bitching and whining about that lack of data seriously until you convince me you actually strongly favor collecting that data so that we can make informed decisions.

    But I don’t think that’s going to happen. What will happen is that you’ll repeat yet again that collecting data can only be a result of a desire to confiscate all guns.

  24. What about that data about the Israeli army not being allowed to take their weapons home on weekends any more, and suicides immediately going down 40%, but only on weekends? Is that data enough for you? Same cultural group, same ages, same weapons, even. And a population of people with formal training in gun use. The only thing that changed was one thing: whether or not those trained gun-holders were allowed to keep those weapons in their home over the weekend.

    And adolescent suicide went down 40%. How’s that for data?

  25. Dann:

    “I thought that the left was opposed to silencing voices as a result of personal actions.”

    I don’t really care what the “left” think, but I think everyone should be allowed to criticize others, decide who they want to listen to and decide who they don’t want to have contact with or give money to. As long as it doesn’t take the form of pure discrimination.

    Don’t you think the same?

  26. It really baffles me that so many from the right always seem to be against the free market and freedom of association.

  27. @Lis

    Making a decision based on incomplete data is by definition uninformed, IMHO.

    @Hampus

    I think there is a modest difference between individual decisions to exercise rights as consumers (as well as freedom of association) and larger mobs hounding an individual out of being gainfully employed for reasons that have nothing to do with their employment.

    As an example, there are a couple of entertainment folks whose work will not cross my threshold. That’s my choice. What I don’t do is write the companies that represent them and/or publish their works and demand that they cease their relationship.

    Regards,
    Dann

  28. Dann: As an example, there are a couple of entertainment folks whose work will not cross my threshold. That’s my choice. What I don’t do is write the companies that represent them and/or publish their works and demand that they cease their relationship.

    A one-person boycott does very little good when that person does not let the company know why their product is being boycotted.

    Sure, you’re not required to do so. Feel free not to. But it’s wrong for you to suggest that someone who does write the company saying what they’re objecting to, and asking the company to cease-and-desist, is out-of-line.

    That is the free market at work.

  29. “I think there is a modest difference between individual decisions to exercise rights as consumers (as well as freedom of association) and larger mobs hounding an individual out of being gainfully employed for reasons that have nothing to do with their employment.”

    What are you talking about!? The only example given in this thread was from Darren Garrison regarding Brendan Eich. Have you even read the FAQ Mozilla has created about him?

    “Brendan was not fired and was not asked by the Board to resign. Brendan voluntarily submitted his resignation. The Board acted in response by inviting him to remain at Mozilla in another C-level position. Brendan declined that offer. The Board respects his decision.”

    Eich saw that he was not the right person to work as the main representative of the company and stepped down. What is it you want? That he should be forced to continue to work against his will?

    How do you even compare a persons own resignation with blacklists?

  30. Before 1967, interracial marriage was still forbidden in several states of the US, people campaigned against letting white and black people marry each other, they thought it was unnatural. Supported the campaigns with money. There was a huge backlash against these people. Today it is impossible for a CEO to pay money to make interracial marriage illegal.

    But now people are campaigning against making interssexual marriage legal. Why shouldn’t they too expect a huge backlash? Why should they think that this is just one opinion among others? That people should be quiet about it?

  31. Dann–

    Almost all decisions, ever, are based on incomplete information and in that sense uninformed, because they are made by humans and other limited, non-omniscient beings.

    For example, I just picked up a cake that I ordered a few days ago. We are going to have leftovers, because I didn’t know when I ordered the cake how large the party was going to be, and I decided “leftover cake” was a better outcome than “nobody gets as much cake as they would like.”

    That doesn’t mean I didn’t use the information I had, about how many people would likely be invited, and how large a slice of cake I can usually eat, and how much that size of cake was going to cost, rather than just rolling some dice to answer the questions about size and flavor.

    In the case of whether how gun ownership affects death and injury rates from various causes, while we can’t have absolute knowledge of what would happen if we changed the laws, or our customs, that doesn’t mean we should throw away what knowledge we do have.

    For example, one reason the homicide rate has declined is improved trauma medicine: people are now surviving assaults that would have been fatal 30 years ago. A sensible policy looks at that and makes sure the emergency rooms are staffed, and considers what other medical research would be useful here. A foolish one looks only at the number of homicides, and calls a press conference to congratulate the police, without investigating whether there are more or fewer assault cases.

  32. Hi Vicki,

    I think there is a difference between using the information available and cherry picking which information is used when making a decision.

    Using your cake purchasing example, say you saw that your cousin Harve had called. You saw his number….and well cousin Harve is the plaid sheep of the family. You knew he was in town for a visit and just didn’t want to get on his list of places to visit. Cousin Harve has 14 kids, in which the plaid-ness spreads.

    Old Harve was calling to say that he was looking forward to bringing the entire brood around for the birthday party. So when he showed up, all of a sudden you didn’t have enough cake.

    By purposefully ignoring some information, a poor cake purchasing decision was made.

    Using CDC data and low quality FBI data without attempting to improve the quality of the FBI data and without attempting to gather data about incidents of successful defense gun use that would not result in data being inputted to the CDC or FBI databases as the basis for evaluating proposed gun regulations seems to invite a similarly poor decision, IMHO.


    Regards,
    Dann

    *and no, I’m not anti-Mormon or some other weird thing.

  33. “Using CDC data and low quality FBI data without attempting to improve the quality of the FBI data and without attempting to gather data about incidents of successful defense gun use that would not result in data being inputted to the CDC or FBI databases as the basis for evaluating proposed gun regulations seems to invite a similarly poor decision, IMHO.”

    Is someone doing that? Not attempting to approve quality when allowed to do so? If so, citation needed.

  34. @Hampus

    Is someone doing that? Not attempting to approve quality when allowed to do so? If so, citation needed.

    Certainly. Most of the sources of agitation for severely restricting/banning private gun ownership within the US frequently cite CDC and FBI data while concomitantly disavowing the existence of issues with the FBI database and the presence of data outside of both databases that might be contrary to their objectives. There’s been a modest amount of that going on in this thread and a couple other recent threads as well.

    BTW, I saw your other responses and fully intend to respond when I’ve got more than a minute to do so. I apologize for the delay.


    Regards,
    Dann

  35. @Dann
    I believe most of us in favor of stricter controls on gun ownership on file 770 would like to see better CDC studies and better FBI data based on past discussions. I’m in favor of congress requiring CDC studies and providing money and training to fix the current problems with FBI data. I’d like all shooting incidents involving in the US to be reported and fully updated in the FBI database regardless of who did the shooting and who was shot (cop, suicide, homicide, accident, animals not legally hunted, property).

  36. @Dann–

    Nice try, but it’s the NRA and its paid lackeys in Congress that are blocking the CDC from doing research, blocking funding of research where the can’t actually ban it, and blocking the FBI from doing any research with the information it can’t help collecting. You claim to be “data driven,” but you apparently support the ban on the CDC doing better research, the FBI really looking at their data.

    And that’s not a serious response to questions about why we shouldn’t do that research.

  37. “Certainly. Most of the sources of agitation for severely restricting/banning private gun ownership within the US frequently cite CDC and FBI data while concomitantly disavowing the existence of issues with the FBI database and the presence of data outside of both databases that might be contrary to their objectives. There’s been a modest amount of that going on in this thread and a couple other recent threads as well.”

    That was no citation at all and certainly not an answer to the question.

  38. So, what’s wrong with the Israeli Army data? You could hardly ask for a better research study: a group of the exactly the same kind of people with exactly the same kind of guns and the same culture, all trained by exactly the same people. And when they were no longer allowed to bring their weapons home on weekends, adolescent suicide immediately dropped 40%, but only on weekends. How is that not good, useful data for your data-driven decisions?

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