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fratboykate · 1 year

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I'm totally in support of the writers in theory but I'm trying to understand more of what you're fighting for because I've seen some people on twitter claim writers make more money a week than most of us make in a month so I'm trying to understand what the issue is. Also if that info is accurate. This is a genuine question. Not trying to have a "gotcha moment". I really want to hear from a writer.

people have always had wild misconceptions about how much a writer earns because of their lack of understanding of how the industry actually works. there's so many posts about how "you guys make 5k a week. what more do you want?!" yeah...let's do some math on that.

5k a week for 14 weeks (and that's a long room. a lot of rooms these days are 8-10 weeks. those are the dreaded mini-rooms we're trying to kill) is $70,000. for roughly three months of work. you'd think we're cooking with gas...BUT HOLD UP. that's gross! let's see everything that has to come out of that check:

10% to our agent

10% to our manager

5% to our entertainment attorney

5% to our business manager (not everyone has one but a lot of us do. i do, so that's literally 30% immediately off the top of every check)

most of these breakdowns ive seen downplay taxes severely. someone made one that says writers pay 5% in taxes and i would like to ask them "in what universe?". that doesn't even cover state taxes. the way taxes work in the industry is really complicated, but the short of it is most of us have companies for tax reasons so we aren't taxed like people on w2s/1099. if we did we'd be even more fucked. basically every production hires a writer's company instead of the writer as an individual. so they engage our companies for our services and then at the end of the year we (the company) pay taxes as corporations or llcs (depending on what the writer chose to go with). my company is registered as a "corporation" so let's go with those rates. california's corporate rate is 9% and the federal corporate tax rate is 21%. there's other expenses with running a business like fees and other shit so my business managers/accountants/bookkeepers have recommended i save between 35-40% of everything i make for when tax season comes.

you see where the math is at already??? 25-30% in commissions and then 35-40% in taxes. on the lower end you're at THE VERY LEAST looking at 60% of that check gone. 70% worst case scenario. suddenly those $70,000 people claim we make are actually down to $28,000 as the take home pay. and that's if you're only losing 60%. it goes down to $21,000 if it's 70%.

lets pretend you worked a long 14 week room (that's the longest room ive ever worked btw) and let's also be generous and say you only have 60% in expenses so the take home is $28,000. average rent in los angeles is around $2,800-$3,000. if you're paying $2,800 in rent that means you need AT LEAST $4,000 a month to have a semi decent life since you need to also cover groceries, gas, medical expenses, toiletries, phone, internet, utilities, rental and car insurances, car payments, student loan payments, etc etc etc. and again, this is los angeles. everything is more expensive so you're living BARE BONES on 4k. and these are numbers as a single person. im not even taking having children into account. so those $28,000 you take home might cover your life for 6-7 months. 3 of which you're in the room working. the reality is that once that room ends, you might not work in a room again for 6-9-12 months (i have friends whose last jobs were over 18 months ago) and you now only have about 3 months left of savings to hold you over. we have to make that money stretch while we do all the endless free development we do for studios and until we get our next paying job. so...3 months left of enough money to cover your expenses -> possible 9 months of not having a job. this is how writers end up on food stamps or applying to work at target.

this is why we're fighting for better rates and better residuals. residuals were a thing writers used to rely on to get them through the unemployment periods. residual checks have gone down from 20k to $0.03 cents. im not joking.

they've decimated our regular pay and then destroyed residuals. we have nothing left. so don't believe it when they tell you writers are being greedy. writers are simply fighting to be able to make a middle class living. we're not asking them to become poor for our sake. we're asking for raises that amount to 2% of their profit. TWO PERCENT. this is a fight for writing even being a career in five years instead of something you do on the side while you work retail to pay your bills. if you think shows are bad now imagine when your writer has to do it as a hobby because they need a real job to pay their bills and support a family. (which none of us can currently afford to have btw)

support writers. stop being bootlickers for billion dollar corporations. stop caring about fictional people more than you care about the real people that write them. if we don't win this fight it truly is game over. the industry as you know it is gone.

#wga strike #writer's strike #hollywood #anonymous #answers #myposts

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Podcasting “Capitalists Hate Capitalism”

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

This week on my podcast, I read "Capitalists Hate Capitalism," my latest column for Locus Magazine:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

What do I mean by "capitalists hate capitalism?" It all comes down to the difference between "profits" and "rents." A capitalist takes capital (money, or the things you can buy with it) and combines it with employees' labor, and generates profits (the capitalist's share) and wages (the workers' share).

Rents, meanwhile, come from owning an asset that capitalists need to generate profits. For example, a landlord who rents a storefront to a coffee shop extracts rent from the capitalist who owns the coffee shop. Meanwhile, the capitalist who owns the cafe extracts profits from the baristas' labor.

Capitalists' founding philosophers like Adam Smith hated rents. Worse: rents were the most important source of income at the time of capitalism's founding. Feudal lords owned great swathes of land, and there were armies of serfs who were bound to that land – it was illegal for them to leave it. The serfs owed rent to lords, and so they worked the land in order grow crops and raise livestock that they handed over the to lord as rent for the land they weren't allowed to leave.

Capitalists, meanwhile, wanted to turn that land into grazing territory for sheep as a source of wool for the "dark, Satanic mills" of the industrial revolution. They wanted the serfs to be kicked off their land so that they would become "free labor" that could be hired to work in those factories.

For the founders of capitalism, a "free market" wasn't free from regulation, it was free from rents, and "free labor" came from workers who were free to leave the estates where they were born – but also free to starve unless they took a job with the capitalists.

For capitalism's philosophers, free markets and free labor weren't just a source of profits, they were also a source of virtue. Capitalists – unlike lords – had to worry about competition from one another. They had to make better goods at lower prices, lest their customers take their business elsewhere; and they had to offer higher pay and better conditions, lest their "free labor" take a job elsewhere.

This means that capitalists are haunted by the fear of losing everything, and that fear acts as a goad, driving them to find ways to make everything better for everyone: better, cheaper products that benefit shoppers; and better-paid, safer jobs that benefit workers. For Smith, capitalism is alchemy, a philosopher's stone that transforms the base metal of greed into the gold of public spiritedness.

By contrast, rentiers are insulated from competition. Their workers are bound to the land, and must toil to pay the rent no matter whether they are treated well or abused. The rent rolls in reliably, without the lord having to invest in new, better ways to bring in the harvest. It's a good life (for the lord).

Think of that coffee-shop again: if a better cafe opens across the street, the owner can lose it all, as their customers and workers switch allegiance. But for the landlord, the failure of his capitalist tenant is a feature, not a bug. Once the cafe goes bust, the landlord gets a newly vacant storefront on the same block as the hot new coffee shop that can be rented out at even higher rates to another capitalist who tries his luck.

The industrial revolution wasn't just the triumph of automation over craft processes, nor the triumph of factory owners over weavers. It was also the triumph of profits over rents. The transformation of hereditary estates worked by serfs into part of the supply chain for textile mills was attended by – and contributed to – the political ascendancy of capitalists over rentiers.

Now, obviously, capitalism didn't end rents – just as feudalism didn't require the total absence of profits. Under feudalism, capitalists still extracted profits from capital and labor; and under capitalism, rentiers still extracted rents from assets that capitalists and workers paid them to use.

The difference comes in the way that conflicts between profits and rents were resolved. Feudalism is a system where rents triumph over profits, and capitalism is a system where profits triumph over rents.

It's conflict that tells you what really matters. You love your family, but they drive you crazy. If you side with your family over your friends – even when your friends might be right and your family's probably wrong – then you value your family more than your friends. That doesn't mean you don't value your friends – it means that you value them less than your family.

Conflict is a reliable way to know whether or not you're a leftist. As Steven Brust says, the way to distinguish a leftist is to ask "What's more important, human rights, or property rights?" If you answer "Property rights are human right," you're not a leftist. Leftists don't necessarily oppose all property rights – they just think they're less important than human rights.

Think of conflicts between property rights and human rights: the grocer who deliberately renders leftover food inedible before putting it in the dumpster to ensure that hungry people can't eat it, or the landlord who keeps an apartment empty while a homeless person freezes to death on its doorstep. You don't have to say "No one can own food or a home" to say, "in these cases, property rights are interfering with human rights, so they should be overridden." For leftists property rights can be a means to human rights (like revolutionary land reformers who give peasants title to the lands they work), but where property rights interfere with human rights, they are set aside.

In his 2023 book Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis claims that capitalism has given way to a new feudalism – that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and feudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Varoufakis's point isn't that capitalists have gone extinct. Rather, it's that today, conflicts between capital and assets – between rents and profits – reliably end with a victory of rent over profit.

Think of Amazon: the "everything store" appears to be a vast bazaar, a flea-market whose stalls are all operated by independent capitalists who decide what to sell, how to price it, and then compete to tempt shoppers. In reality, though, the whole system is owned by a single feudalist, who extracts 51% from every dollar those merchants take in, and decides who can sell, and what they can sell, and at what price, and whether anyone can even see it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Or consider the patent trolls of the Eastern District of Texas. These "companies" are invisible and produce nothing. They consist solely of a serviced mailbox in a dusty, uninhabited office-building, and an overbroad patent (say, a patent on "tapping on a screen with your finger") issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. These companies extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Apple, Google, Samsung for violating these patents. In other words, the government steps in and takes vast profits generated through productive activity by companies that make phones, and turns that money over as rent paid to unproductive companies whose sole "product" is lawsuits. It's the triumph of rent over profit.

Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents are insulated from competition. The merchants who sell on Jeff Bezos's Amazon (or open a cafe in a landlord's storefront, or license a foolish smartphone patent) bear all the risk. The landlords – of Amazon, the storefront, or the patent – get paid whether or not that risk pays off.

This is why Google, Apple and Samsung also have vast digital estates that they rent out to capitalists – everything from app stores to patent portfolios. They would much rather be in the business of renting things out to capitalists than competing with capitalists.

Hence that famous Adam Smith quote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." This is literally what Google and Meta do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

And it's what Apple and Google do:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/27/23934961/google-antitrust-trial-defaults-search-deal-26-3-billion

Why compete with one another when you can collude, like feudal lords with adjacent estates who trust one another to return any serf they catch trying to sneak away in the dead of night?

Because of course, it's not just "free markets" that have been captured by rents ("Competition is for losers" -P. Thiel) – it's also "free labor." For years, the largest tech and entertainment companies in America illegally colluded on a "no poach" agreement not to hire one-anothers' employees:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/03/apple-google-other-silicon-valley-tech-giants-ordered-to-pay-415m-in-no-poaching-suit/

These companies were bitter competitors – as were these sectors. Even as Big Content was lobbying for farcical copyright law expansions and vowing to capture Big Tech, all these companies on both sides were able to set aside their differences and collude to bind their free workers to their estates and end the "wasteful competition" to secure their labor.

Of course, this is even more pronounced at the bottom of the labor market, where noncompete "agreements" are the norm. The median American worker bound by a noncompete is a fast-food worker whose employer can wield the power of the state to prevent that worker from leaving behind the Wendy's cash-register to make $0.25/hour more at the McDonald's fry trap across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Employers defend this as necessary to secure their investment in training their workers and to ensure the integrity of their trade secrets. But why should their investments be protected? Capitalism is about risk, and the fear that accompanies risk – fear that drives capitalists to innovate, which creates the public benefit that is the moral justification for capitalism.

Capitalists hate capitalism. They don't want free labor – they want labor bound to the land. Capitalists benefit from free labor: if you have a better company, you can tempt away the best workers and cause your inferior rival to fail. But feudalists benefit from un-free labor, from tricks like "bondage fees" that force workers to pay in order to quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Companies like Petsmart use "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) to keep low-waged workers from leaving for better employers. Petsmart says it costs $5,500 to train a pet-groomer, and if that worker is fired, laid off, or quits less than two years, they have to pay that amount to Petsmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Now, Petsmart is full of shit here. The "four-week training course" Petsmart claims is worth $5,500 actually only lasts for three weeks. What's more, the "training" consists of sweeping the floor and doing other low-level chores for three weeks, without pay.

But even if Petsmart were to give $5,500 worth of training to every pet-groomer, this would still be bullshit. Why should the worker bear the risk of Petsmart making a bad investment in their training? Under capitalism, risks justify rewards. Petsmart's argument for charging $50 to groom your dog and paying the groomer $15 for the job is that they took $35 worth of risk. But some of that risk is being borne by the worker – they're the ones footing the bill for the training.

For Petsmart – as for all feudalists – a worker (with all the attendant risks) can be turned into an asset, something that isn't subject to competition. Petsmart doesn't have to retain workers through superior pay and conditions – they can use the state's contract-enforcement mechanism instead.

Capitalists hate capitalism, but they love feudalism. Sure, they dress this up by claiming that governmental de-risking spurs investment: "Who would pay to train a pet-groomer if that worker could walk out the next day and shave dogs for some competing shop?"

But this is obvious nonsense. Think of Silicon Valley: high tech is the most "IP-intensive" of all industries, the sector that has had to compete most fiercely for skilled labor. And yet, Silicon Valley is in California, where noncompetes are illegal. Every single successful Silicon Valley company has thrived in an environment in which their skilled workers can walk out the door at any time and take a job with a rival company.

There's no indication that the risk of free labor prevents investment. Think of AI, the biggest investment bubble in human history. All the major AI companies are in jurisdictions where noncompetes are illegal. Anthropic – OpenAI's most serious competitor – was founded by a sister/brother team who quit senior roles at OpenAI and founded a direct competitor. No one can claim with a straight face that OpenAI is now unable to raise capital on favorable terms.

What's more, when OpenAI founder Sam Altman was forced out by his board, Microsoft offered to hire him – and 700 other OpenAI personnel – to found an OpenAI competitor. When Altman returned to the company, Microsoft invested more money in OpenAI, despite their intimate understanding that anyone could hire away the company's founder and all of its top technical staff at any time.

The idea that the departure of the Burger King trade secrets locked up in its workers' heads constitute more of a risk to the ability to operate a hamburger restaurant than the departure of the entire technical staff of OpenAI is obvious nonsense. Noncompetes aren't a way to make it possible to run a business – they're a way to make it easy to run a business, by eliminating competition and pushing the risk onto employees.

Because capitalists hate capitalism. And who can blame them? Who wouldn't prefer a life with less risk to one where you have to constantly look over your shoulder for competitors who've found a way to make a superior offer to your customers and workers?

This is why businesses are so excited about securing "IP" – that is, a government-backed right to control your workers, customers, competitors or critics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The argument for every IP right expansion is the same: "Who would invest in creating something new without the assurance that someone else wouldn’t copy and improve on it and put them out of business?"

That was the argument raised five years ago, during the (mercifully brief) mania for genre writers seeking trademarks on common tropes. There was the romance writer who got a trademark on the word "cocky" in book titles:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal

And the fantasy writer who wanted a trademark on "dragon slayer" in fantasy novel titles:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/14/son-of-cocky-a-writer-is-trying-to-trademark-dragon-slayer-for-fantasy-novels/

Who subsequently sought a trademark on any book cover featuring a person holding a weapon:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/07/19/trademark-troll-who-claims-to-own-dragon-slayer-now-wants-exclusive-rights-to-book-covers-where-someone-is-holding-a-weapon/

For these would-be rentiers, the logic was the same: "Why would I write a book about a dragon-slayer if I could lose readers to someone else who writes a book about dragon-slayers?"

In these cases, the USPTO denied or rescinded its trademarks. Profits triumphed over rents. But increasingly, rents are triumphing over profits, and rent-extraction is celebrated as "smart business," while profits are for suckers, only slightly preferable to "wages" (the worst way to get paid under both capitalism and feudalism).

That's what's behind all the talk about "passive income" – that's just a euphemism for "rent." It's what Douglas Rushkoff is referring to in Survival of the Richest when he talks about the wealthy wanting to "go meta":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don't drive a cab – go meta and buy a medallion. Don't buy a medallion, go meta and found Uber. Don't found Uber, go meta and invest in Uber. Don't invest in Uber, go meta and buy options on Uber stock. Don't buy Uber stock options, go meta and buy derivatives of options on Uber stock.

"Going meta" means distancing yourself from capitalism – from income derived from profits, from competition, from risk – and cozying up to feudalism.

Capitalists have always hated capitalism. The owners of the dark Satanic mills wanted peasants turned off the land and converted into "free labor" – but they also kidnapped Napoleonic war-orphans and indentured them to ten-year terms of service, which was all you could get out of a child's body before it was ruined for further work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

When Varoufakis says we've entered a new feudal age, he doesn't mean that we've abolished capitalism. He means that – for the first time in centuries – when rents go to war against profits – the rents almost always emerge victorious.

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2024/04/14/capitalists-hate-capitalism/

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_465_-_Capitalists_Hate_Capitalism.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

#pluralistic #technofeudalism #yanis varoufakis #rents #profits #economics #podcasts #locus magazine #mp3s

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nostalgebraist · 1 year

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Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

[EDIT: I've seen several people misread the previous line and infer that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is still using GPT-2. She isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Her latest model is a finetuned LLaMA-13B.]

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

#nostalgebraist autoresponder meta

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puckettrents · 2 years

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5 Benefits of Renting an Industrial Generator for Your Worksite

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Original Source: 5 Benefits of Renting an Industrial Generator for Your Worksite

#Construction equipment rental #Equipment rental #Construction equipment for rent #Equipment rental company #Equipment rental service #Contracting equipment rental #Landscaping equipment rental #Renting Industrial Generator #Generator rental #renting commercial generator

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derinwrites · 5 months

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How can I make money writing fiction?

I'm gonna be straight with you. There is no guarantee that you'll make enough as an independent writer to make it worth your time. You very well might -- I make a liveable wage as an independent writer -- but many don't. Most writers I know also have a job. And luck plays a big part in it.

If you're interested in going forward in spite of this, you have two main options for monetisation open to you, and you are going to have to pick one. I call them the sales model and the sponsorship model, and you are going to have to pick one.

The sales model involves writing stories and selling them to readers. You can put books up on Amazon or Smashwords, sell them direct from your own website, enlist the help of a traditional publisher to handle that for you and let them decide where to sell, whatever -- the point is that your money is made from the sale of books to readers. If you go with a traditional publisher, you're using this model (though they will give you some of the money ahead of time in the form of an advance). Most indie authors also use this model, publishing through draft2digital, Ingram Spark, direct through Amazon, whatever. I've never relied on the sales model and can't give you any advice on how to do this, but Tumblr is full of indie authors who probably can.

The sponsorship model involves soliciting small amounts of money from various readers over time. This is ideal for web serials, and it's what I use. I use Patreon, which is designed specifically for this purpose, but you can use other sites such as ko-fi. This model involves providing regular content for free, with bonuses for those who support you.

"Can't I do both? Sell books and have a Patreon?" You absolutely can! I know several indie authors with a Patreon. I sell my completed books as ebooks and will eventually sell them as paperbacks. But your time and attention is limited, and so is your audience's, and you're going to have to half-arse one of these in order to have enough arse to whole-arse the other. You're going to make a lo of decisions that benefit either the sponsorship model or the sales model, not both. So pick your primary income source early and commit.

I can only advise on writing web serials and using the sponsorship model, so I'll go ahead with that assumption. If you want to make a liveable wage doing this, not only will you need luck, you'll also need patience. This is not a fast way to build a career. at the end of my first year of doing this, I had one single patron, and they were a real-life friend of mine. When I reached an income of $100/month, I threw a little party for myself, I was so happy. It had taken such a long time and was so much work. I reached enough to cover rent/mortgage after I'd been doing this for more than four years. It's a long term sort of career.

Here are some general tips for succeeding in this industry, given by me, someone with no formal training in any of this who only vaguely knows what they're talking about:

Have a consistent update schedule and STICK TO IT

The #1 indicator for stable success in this industry (aside from luck, which we're discounting because you can't do much about that) is having a consistent update schedule. Your readers need to know when the next chapter is coming out, and it should be coming out regularly. Ideally, you should have no breaks or hiatuses -- if you're in a bus crash or something, that might be unavoidable, and your readers will understand if you tell them, but if you're stopping and starting a lot for trivial reasons, they WILL abandon you. You can't get away with that shit if you're not Andrew Hussie, and I'm pretty sure Andrew Hussie doesn't message me for career advice on Tumblr. If you find you need a lot of hiatuses to write fast enough then you're updating too often; change your schedule. A regular schedule is more important than a fast one (ideally it should be both, but if you have to pick between the two, pick regular).

2. Pay attention to your readership, listen to what they want from you

Your income is based on a pretty complicated support structure when you're using the sponsorship model. this model relies on people finding your story, liking your story, and continuing to find it valuable enough to keep paying you month after month. This means that your rewards for your sponsors should be things that they value and will continue to pay for ('knowing I'm supporting an artist whose work I enjoy' counts as a thing that they value, to my great surprise; there's a lot of people giving me money just for the sake of giving me money, so I can pay my mortgage and keep writing for them without needing a second job), but it also means supporting the entire network that attracts readers and keeps them having the best time they can with your story -- being part of a rewarding community. Because this is advice on making money, I'm going to roughly divide your readership into groups based on how they affect your bottom line:

sponsors. People giving you money directly. The importance of keeping this group happy should be obvious.

administration and community helpers -- discord moderators, IT people, guys who set up fan wikis, whoever's handling your mailing list if you have a mailing list. You can do this stuff yourself, or you can hire someone to do it, but if you're incredibly lucky and people enjoy being a part of your reader community, people will sometimes volunteer to do the work for free. If you are lucky enough to get such people, respect them. They are doing you a massive favour, and they're not doing it for you, but to maintain a place that they value, and you have to respect both of those things. My discord has just shy of 1,300 members and is moderated by volunteers. I'd peel my own face off if I had to moderate a community that large. If you've got people stepping up to do work for you, you need to respect them and you need to make sure that they continue to find that rewarding by doing what you can to make sure that the community they're maintaining is rewarding. Sometimes this means taking actions and sometimes this means staying the fuck out of the way. Depending on the circumstances.

fan artists. Once you have people drawing your characters, writing fanfic of your stories, whatever, treat these like fucking gold. Give them a space to do this, and more importantly, give them a space to do this without you in it. Fanworks are a symptom of engagement with your work, which is massively important. They are also a component of a healthy community, an avenue for readers to talk to each other and express themselves creatively to each other. Third, fanworks act as a bridge for new readers. When readers share their art on, say, Tumblr, it can intrigue new people and get them into the story. Your job in all of this is to give them the space to work, encourage them as required or invited (I reblog most TTOU fanart that I'm tagged in on Tumblr, for instance), and other than that, stay the fuck out of their way. These people are vital to the liveblood of your community, the continued engagement of your audience, and the interest of your sponsors. Some of the fan artists will be sponsors themselves; some won't be. Those who aren't sponsors are still massively valuable for their art.

speculators, conversers, theorists, livebloggers, and That Guy Who's Just Really Jazzed For The Next Chapter. Some people don't make art but just like to chat about your story. These people are a bedrock of the community that's supporting your sponsors and increasing your readership, and therefore are critical to your income stream. Give them a place to talk. Be nice to them when they talk to you. Sometimes, they'll ask you questions about the story, which you can choose to answer or not, however you feel is appropriate. They'll also want to chat about non-story-related stuff with each other, so make sure they have a place to do that, too.

that guy who never talks to you or comments on anything but linked your story to ten guys in his office who all read it now. Some of your supporters are completely invisible to you. You can't do anything for these people except continue to release the story and have a forum they can silently lurk on if they want to. But, y'know, they exist.

If you want to focus on income then these are, roughly, the groups of people that you will need to listen to and accommodate for. You can generally just make sure they have space to do their thing, and if they want anything else, they'll tell you (yes, guys, paperbacks will be coming eventually). Many people will fit into multiple groups -- I have some sponsors that are in every single one of these groups except the last. Some will only be in one group. A healthy income rests on a healthy community which rests on accommodating these needs.

3. If you can manage it, try to make your story good.

It's also helpful for your story to be good. Economically, this is far less important than you'd think -- there are some people out there writing utter garbage and making a living doing it. Garbage by what standards? By whatever your standards are. Just think of the absolute laziest, emptiest, hackiest waste-of-bandwidth story you can imagine -- some guy is half-arsing that exact story and making three times what you'll ever make on Patreon doing it. And honestly? Good for him. If he's making that much then his readers are enjoying it, and that's what matters. Still, one critical component of making money as a writer is writing something that people actually want to read. And you can't trick them with web serials, because they don't pay in advance -- if they're bored, they'll just stop. So you have to make it worth their time, money and attention, and the simplest way to do that is to write a good story.

This hardly seems mentioning, since you were presumably planning to do that anyway. It's basic respect for your audience to give them something worth their time. Besides, if we're not interested in improving our craft and striving for our best, what are we even writing for? I'm sure I don't need to tell you to try to write a good story. The reason I list this is in fact the opposite -- don't let "I'm not a good enough writer" paralyse you. The world is full of someday-writers who endlessly fuss over and revise a single story because it's not good enough, it's not perfect, they're not Terry Pratchett yet. Neither was Terry Pratchett when his first books were published. If you're waiting to be good enough, you won't start. I didn't think Curse Words was good enough when I started releasing it -- I still don't. I started putting it out because I knew it was the only way I'd get myself to actually finish something. I don't think it's all that great, but you know what? An awful lot of people read it and really enjoyed it. And if I hadn't released it, I'd have been doing those people a disservice.

Also, it taught me a lot, and based on what I learned, Time to Orbit: Unknown is much better. If I'd never released Curse Words, if I hadn't seen how people read it and reacted to it and seen what worked and what didn't, then Time to Orbit: Unknown wouldn't be very good. And it certainly wouldn't be making me a living wage, because it was the years writing Curse Words that started building the momentum I have today.

And Time to Orbit: Unknown as it is today has some serious problems. Problems that I'm learning from. And the next book will be a lot better.

So that's basically my advice for making money in this industry. Be patient, be lucky, be consistent. Value your community; it's your lifeline, even the parts of it that don't directly pay you. And try to make your story as good as you can, but make that an activity you do, not a barrier to prevent you from starting.

Good luck.

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shivaangensets · 9 months

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apas-95 · 10 months

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Is there a story behind China's one child policy that makes it not as horrifying as western media claims?

The defining feature of China's development for the past 70 years has been the urban-rural divide. In order to develop a semi-feudal country with a very low industrial level into an industrialised, socialist nation, it was necessary to develop industrial centres. To 'organically' develop industrial centres would have taken many decades, if not centuries of continued impoverishment and starvation, so programs were put in place to accelerate the development of industry by preferentially supporting cities.

Programs like the 'urban-rural price scissors' placed price controls on agricultural products, which made food affordable for city-dwellers, at the direct expense of reducing the income of rural, agricultural areas. This hits on the heart of the issue - to preferentially develop industrial centres in order to support the rest of the country, the rest of the country must first take up the burden of supporting those centres. Either some get out of poverty *first*, or nobody gets out of poverty at all. The result being: a divide between urban and rural areas in their quality of life and prospects. In order to keep this system from falling apart, several other policies were needed to support it, such as the Hukou system, which controlled immigration within the country. The Hukou system differentiated between rural and urban residents, and restricted immigration to urban areas - because, given the urban-rural divide, everyone would rather just try to move to the cities, leaving the agricultural industry to collapse. The Hukou system (alongside being a piece in many other problems, like the 'one country two systems', etc) prevented this, and prevented the entire thing from collapsing. The 'one child policy' was another system supporting this mode of development. It applied principally to city-dwellers, to prevent the populations of cities expanding beyond the limited size the agricultural regions could support, and generally had no 'punishments' greater than a lack of government child-support, or even a fine, for those who still wanted additional children. Ethnic minorities, and rural residents, were granted additional children, with rural ethnic minorities getting double. It wasn't something anyone would love, but it served an important purpose.

I use the past-tense, here, because these systems have either already been phased out or are in the process of being phased out. The method of urban-rural price scissors as a method of development ran its course, and, ultimately, was exhausted - the negative aspects, of its underdevelopment of rural regions, began to overwhelm its positive aspects. So, it was replaced with the paradigm of 'Reform and Opening Up' around the 1980s. Urban-rural price scissors were removed (leading to protests by urban workers and intellectuals in the late '80s), and the Hukou system, along with the 'one child policy', were and are being slowly eased out as lessening inequality between the urban and rural areas make them unnecessary. Under the new system, the driver of development was no longer at the expense of rural regions, but was carried out through the internal market and external capital. The development paradigm of Reform and Opening Up worked to resolved some contradictions, in the form of the urban-rural divide, and created some of its own, in the form of internal wealth divisions within the cities. Through it, over 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty - almost all of them being in rural areas - and extreme poverty was completely abolished within China. 'Extreme poverty' can be a difficult thing for westerners to grasp, wherein poverty means not paying rent on time, but to illustrate - many of the last holdout regions of extreme poverty were originally guerrilla base areas, impassable regions of mountainside which were long hikes away from schools or hospitals, wherein entire villages were living in conditions not dissimilar to their feudal state a century before. These villages were, when possible, given infrastructure and a meaningful local industry accounting their environment and tradition (like growing a certain type of mountainous fruit), or entirely relocated to free government-built housing lower down the mountain that was theirs to own. These were the people the 'one child policy' was aiding, by reducing the urban population they had to support. Again, there were exemptions for rural and ethnic minority populations to the policy.

Even now, Reform and Opening Up is running its course. Its own negative aspects, such as urban wealth inequality, are beginning to overcome its positive aspects. So, the new paradigm is 'Common Prosperity', which will work to resolve the past system's contradictions, and surely introduce its own contradictions in the form of chafing against the national bourgeoisie, as it increases state control and ownership of industry, and furthers a reintroduced collectivisation. Organising a nation of well over a billion people is not simple. It is not done based on soundbytes and on picking apart policies in the abstract for how 'dystopian' they sound. It is an exceedingly complex and interconnected process based on a dialectical, material analysis of things; not a utopian, idealist one. What matters is this: those 800,000,000 people now freed from absolute poverty. The things necessary to achieve that were, unquestionably, good things - because they achieved that. They had their negative aspects, as does everything that exists, but they were unquestionably correct and progressive things.

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robertreich · 4 months

Video

youtube

How Wall Street Priced You Out of a Home

Rent is skyrocketing and home buying is out of reach for millions. One big reason why? Wall Street.

Hedge funds and private equity firms have been buying up hundreds of thousands of homes that would otherwise be purchased by people. Wall Street’s appetite for housing ramped up after the 2008 financial crisis. As you’ll recall, the Street’s excessive greed created a housing bubble that burst. Millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure.

Did the Street learn a lesson? Of course not. It got bailed out. Then it began picking off the scraps of the housing market it had just destroyed, gobbling up foreclosed homes at fire-sale prices — which it then sold or rented for big profits.

Investor purchases hit their peak in 2022, accounting for around 28% of all home sales in America.

Home buyers frequently reported being outbid by cash offers made by investors. So called “iBuyers” used algorithms to instantly buy homes before offers could even be made by actual humans.

If the present trend continues, by 2030, Wall Street investors may control 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes.

Partly as a result, homeownership — a cornerstone of generational wealth and a big part of the American dream — is increasingly out of reach for a large number of Americans, especially young people.

Now, Wall Street’s feasting has slowed recently due to rising home prices — even the wolves of Wall Street are falling victim to sticker shock. But that hasn’t stopped them from specifically targeting more modestly priced homes — buying up a record share of the country’s most affordable homes at the end of 2023.

They’ve also been most active in bigger cities, particularly in the Sun Belt, which has become an increasingly expensive place to live. And they’re pointedly going after neighborhoods that are home to communities of color.

For example, in one diverse neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina, Wall Street-backed investors bought half of the homes that sold in 2021 and 2022. On a single block, investors bought every house but one, and turned them into rentals.

Folks, it’s a vicious cycle: First you’re outbid by investors, then you may be stuck renting from them at excessive prices that leave you with even less money to put up for a new home. Rinse. Repeat.

Now I want to be clear: This is just one part of the problem with housing in America. The lack of supply is considered the biggest reason why home prices and rents have soared — and are outpacing recent wage gains. But Wall Street sinking its teeth into whatever is left on the market is making the supply problem even worse.

So what can we do about this? Start by getting Wall Street out of our homes.

Democrats have introduced a bill in both houses of Congress to ban hedge funds and private equity firms from buying or owning single-family homes.

If signed into law, this could increase the supply of homes available to individual buyers — thereby making housing more affordable.

President Biden has also made it a priority to tackle the housing crisis, proposing billions in funding to increase the supply of homes and tax credits to help actual people buy them.

Now I have no delusions that any of this will be easy to get done. But these plans provide a roadmap of where the country could head — under the right leadership.

So many Americans I meet these days are cynical about the country. I understand their cynicism. But cynicism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy if it means giving up the fight.

The captains of American industry and Wall Street would like nothing better than for the rest of us to give up that fight, so they can take it all.

I say we keep fighting.

#youtube #housing #homes #economy #corporations #Wall Street #money #finance #video #videos

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