In my brother’s household, dog ears as shown in the first picture are referred to as “hopeful ears.” And Ashley certainly has those sometimes. But other times her ears look like those in the second picture. I refer to those as “Abandon all hope ye who enter here ears.”
I’ve read a lot of manuscripts over the years. At Clarion I read 4 or 5 stories a day for six weeks, and did a critique on each one. Before and after that I’ve read and critiqued stories for friends, for relations, and for members of critique groups. Reading as an editor is a completely different thing.
Reading for critique means reading to figure out how to make the story better. Part of it is looking for mistakes, but not just any mistakes.
I mean, many writers are happy to get a line-edit of a story. (I mentioned to one of the other people at Clarion that I appreciated the line-edit he had provided. He said, “Oh, if that was useful, I’ll do more of it on your future stories.” And he did, which over the course of the next six weeks meant I learned most of what I should have learned in 12 years of school, about what errors I was prone to in grammar, punctuation, spelling, sentence construction, etc.) But a line-edit is primarily useful as part of a critique if the story is nearly perfect except for a few typos. (Or if, like me, you didn’t pay attention in high school and need to back up and learn some of that stuff.)
James Patrick Kelly talked about about the three kinds of critiques that are useful. It depends on the kind of story you have in your hand.
Jim’s talk at the beginning today was about the kinds of stories that get workshopped. He said you can workshop a story that is:
- broken
- finished
- ready to submit
His point was that the critique needs to be done differently, depending on where the story is. For a broken story, you might suggest major changes to the story structure, major cuts or expansions, changes in direction, etc. For a finished story you wouldn’t suggest those things, but you might suggest a way to improve the twist at the ending or to raise the stakes a bit before the climax or a way to bring out the subtext a bit better. For a ready-to-submit story you might just suggest a bit of polish and point out things like awkward sentences or bits that were unintentionally funny.
— my Clarion journal: https://www.philipbrewer.net/Journal/2001/2001-06-19.php.)
What I (and my brother) have been doing for the past five or six weeks is reading as slush readers. It’s a completely different exercise. The question is not “How to make the story better.” For me, the question is more like, “Will this story, with minimal editing, delight the readers of Elegant Lich magazine?”
Of course, there’s a lot of territory beyond that question. Our first issue isn’t out yet. We’ve talked about what we want to produce, but we haven’t been doing this long enough to have much of a joint vision at all—neither of the magazine, nor of the slush reading process.
I started this post several weeks ago, wanting to say, “Well, the first week or two it was taking me forever to read a story, but now I think I’ve got it,” but that turned out to be premature, which is part of the reason this post is only going up now.
I do think I’ll be able to do the slush-reading part more quickly, next time we open to submissions. My brother will be at least as happy about that as I am.
We could use that hashtag.
On Weibo, China’s dominant social media platform, the hashtag “Trump suffered a complete and utter defeat” was trending as results were announced.
Source: New York Times
For the last 40 years, I’ve pretty much just enjoyed market declines. Especially in the early days I had very little invested, so even a huge percentage change was a pretty small amount of money to me. That made it easy to simply enjoy the drama—all the serious people running in circles, screaming and shouting.
I have been known many times to say, “If the weather can’t be good, it should at least be bad enough to be interesting.” Big market moves have historically engendered the same kind of feelings in me.
Even the last big decline, the Great Financial Crisis—which happened right after I’d retired, prompting a good measure of black humor (“I wouldn’t want to be someone who’d just retired, right before his stock market portfolio took a 40% hit!”)—didn’t keep me from being able to enjoy the journey.
Today’s decline is not different. At least, it’s not yet different.
A big part of why I could enjoy the early declines was that I had a regular income, with a tidy chunk going into the markets. To a person in that situation, a big decline in stock prices is a big sale. All the stocks just got cheaper to buy.
Now that I’m long retired, that is less true.
As I say, the main reason I’ve long been interested in big declines is that they’re interesting. This one is perhaps more interesting than most, because this could be the AI bubble popping.
Let me be clear that it is much too early to announce that this is the AI bubble popping. It is entirely possible that the markets will take this as a “brief correction” and then zoom off to even more absurd heights before the bubble pops. And it is also not certain that the bubble will pop in any kind of dramatic way. Sometimes these things just work themselves out, with the over-extended stocks pulling back gradually over a few years while other stocks go up, in a way that never produces a dramatic crash to point at.
One thing I do want to observe is this by Paul Krugman:
“… it’s increasingly difficult to see how the hyperscalers can realize their gargantuan investment plans unless someone is willing to take massive losses.”
And there will be massive loses. I mean, even if everybody went “You know, maybe we don’t want to spend so much on data centers,” and quit borrowing and spending, there’s quite a bit of debt that’s not going to get paid back. But if they go on borrowing and spending, there’s going to be a gargantuan amount of debt that isn’t going to get paid back.
Who loses all that money?
Well, to begin with, the people who lent the money to people who couldn’t pay it back. There are also people who guaranteed that debt in various ways; they should be on the hook as well. But we know from the great financial crisis that it won’t be only (or even primarily) the lenders. During the Great Financial Crisis, the banks (who made horrible, terrible, no good mortgage loans to people who had no hope of ever paying the money back) were protected. Instead, the home owners got absolutely screwed by the banks, by the governments, and by the courts.
And this time around, we won’t have home owners to put on the hook for it. The money has been borrowed by Special Purpose Vehicles—companies whose only purpose is to borrow money to fund some activity (such as building a data center), while keeping the borrowing off the books of the big companies who want to use the data centers to run AI models.
The special purpose vehicles will be screwed, which is exactly their purpose. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help, because the companies who loaned the money, and the companies who guaranteed the money (such as by promising to pay to run their models at the data center built by that SPV) are all kind of important to the economy. As I say, the whole purpose of the SPV was that it (and the people who loaned it money) get screwed. But that’s only okay if it’s just the random SPV here and there. If they all go down, then the whole AI sector goes down, and that’s half the stock market at this point.
That observation, along with Paul Krugman’s observation, got me wondering: Who might be stuck with the massive losses?
I mentioned the question to my brother, who suggested it’d be “Mom & Pop who bought mutual funds for their retirements.”
I think that’s exactly right. They’re going to try to stick it to the Boomers. That’s the only group that has the money to cover those losses. (Except for the billionaires, and the whole point is to make sure they don’t have to take it on the chin.)
That somewhat changes my perspective on big declines in the stock market.
What sort of monster would send me “Important Health Information” bulk rate?
Taken over the course of just a minute, all from the same spot along the prairie path. The second two are panoramas.
I really like this first one.
The panoramas are also okay.
I appreciate how different they are from one another.
The new ones are the Champaign County Forest Preserve District sticker a bit right of center at the top, and the Obama Presidential Center sticker a bit right of center at the bottom.
We got the former by attending the Whiskey Walk at Buffalo Trace Prairie on Sunday. That was wonderful great fun. A nice walk, lots of whiskeys to taste (and some non-whiskeys as well). I ran into three former coworkers and got to catch up with them—a fun treat. And there were several dogs including a very well-behaved golden retriever who was (very inappropriately) running off-leash—a fact that didn’t seem to bother anybody.
Jackie got the latter when she and her friend Rosie went to the Obama Center on a trip to Chicago (and gave the sticker to me, because she knows I like to put stickers on my laptop).
Many websites have started running some sort of “human-verification” script before showing the content. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes (these seem to be much simpler than a captcha); I assume they’re just running some script that AI content scrapers don’t support, and if you don’t let the script run, they assume you’re a content scraper and don’t show you the content.
The problem is that I don’t let random scripts from third-party sites run on my machine.
This is primarily a security measure on my part. Secondarily, it also blocks most advertising. (I don’t really care about the ads themselves; I primarily object to the risk that random scripts will do something malicious on my machine. It’s still nice to avoid the ads.)
Yesterday there were three different pages that I tried to look at that didn’t load, because I wouldn’t let the “are you a human” scripts run.
That made me a little sad, but not sad enough to let random scripts run on my machine. Maybe I missed reading a really interesting post. But there are many, many interesting posts out there. I don’t have time to read even a tiny fraction of the things I’d find very interesting, so I’m generally unwilling to put much effort into getting to any particular post.
If that post is your post. . . . Either post it so I can see it, or just accept that it will go unread by me. I’ll be okay either way.
This is rather the opposite problem of the one my brother recently posted about: a talk we attended, where SFWA brought in several people to talk about the problem of detecting AI-written manuscripts.
Most of the people in the audience were writers, so of course there was roughly equal concern about false positives (falsely identifying actual human-written manuscripts as AI) as there was about false negatives (failing to identify an AI-written manuscript as AI). No one wants their work to get turned away because people assume it was written by a bot, and of course a single false accusation could ruin not only all hopes of a particular work seeing success, but ruin an entire career.
I’m not worried about AI killing us all, but I’m rather annoyed by people using AI to make my life worse in various ways, and by people who worry about AI making my life worse in these other ways.
Full disclosure: I am not handy at all.
Having said that…. Jackie bought this stool perhaps a decade ago, to use for sitting at her spinning wheel. Turned out, she really liked it, and has used it for all manner of sitting since then—any textile arts activity (weaving, etc.), but also just sitting at the dining table.
She shellacked it herself, having decided on shellac because it is so non-toxic, compared to pretty much any other wood finish.
Over the past ten years or so, the shellac wore along the front edge of the stool, and it got scuffed up in various places. She’s been complaining about this for a while now, and I bought a fresh can of shellac and some sandpaper, so she could fix it. Just lately she’s been complaining that the front edge was getting kind of splintery, where the wood had worn, after the shellac wore away.
It took a while, but I eventually understood that she was hoping that I would go ahead and refinish her stool for her. (I’d thought that, since she’d done it herself in the first place, she’d have a proprietary interest in doing it again herself. Turns out, no.)
Today she complained again about how the splinters were catching not only on her clothes, but also on her skin. So I said, “Right! I’ll fix it!”
It took a while to track down the sandpaper, but once I had that, the smoothing off of the splintery bits went very quickly. Then I opened the can of shellac and brushed it on.
The directions say to wait an hour, sand it again, and then give it another coat. I’m sure that would be a great idea, but I’m not at all sure that I’ll do so. It’s actually looking pretty good with just one more coat over the coat Jackie gave it 10 years ago.
So now I am feeling very handy. Handy enough to feel somewhat manly as well.
I hesitate to take a victory lap regarding my predictions for the Iran conflict, and my predictions for the harms produced by AI. This post is just to say: I stand by what I have been saying.
With a bit of commentary, here’s the posts I’m standing by:
One thing that’s a little difficult just now is structuring your investments so that when the AI bubble collapses your whole portfolio doesn’t collapse along with it. That’s harder than you might think, because AI, and AI-related stuff (power generation, data center construction, real estate under data centers, lending money to AI companies, etc.) add up to be most of the S&P 500 now.
I’ve been toying with various ideas—investing in foreign companies, investing in dividend-paying stocks, investing in government bonds. I just heard a podcaster claim that really the only sectors of the economy that aren’t mostly AI-related now are maybe consumer staples and health care, which aren’t really enough to add up to a diversified portfolio. He suggested just investing in short-term government securities, and waiting for the bubble to pop. So that aligns nicely with my preconceptions.
