Year: 2006

I’m trying a new way tp make this weblog work with the book. This is why it’s good to start before the book gets published – it takes me months to figure this stuff out.

Anyway, there is now a category for each chapter (see over there on the right, unless you’re using an RSS reader, which you probably are), and any material relevant will be categorized by chapter. What that means is that the pages over on my book site can have links that go straight to some relevant material. I’ve added some links to the table of contents page and the links page. I hope these will get expanded in the next few weeks and months, especially as I finished the index tonight, so it’s one step closer to actually being printed.

Written (based on a talk, so it is a bit casual and disjointed) a little while ago, but newly relevant given the fuss about the Seymour Hersh New Yorker piece. Sample paragraph:

THE US BUNKER BUSTER | The US government ought to
recognize the taboo is in its favor and not try to develop a new
generation of weapons with the aim of making them somehow useful on the
battlefield. I’m afraid a lot of people in the Pentagon think, “We are
so rich in nuclear weapons, it is a shame not to use them.” They should
learn we are so rich in people and infrastructure that we will risk
losing that if we encourage others, by our own example, to look
positively on the use of nuclear weapons.

Link: NPQ.

I’d heard about this but not seen it anywhere until now. Orders at drive-through restaurants are sometimes processed long distance — that is, the person you talk to is not in the restaurant, but may be on another continent somewhere. What does it mean? Haven’t a clue. Odd though.

Link: The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order – New York Times.

In a story that will have a familiar ring to it for anyone from Canada, the Grauniad reports on HMV (aka Waterstone’s) being given the go ahead to take over Ottakars: another example of how free markets fail to preserve diversity once economies of scale kick in.

Link: Chain reaction from Guardian Unlimited: Culture Vulture.

"Waterstone’s choose about 5,000 books a year and promote them so that they sell tremendously – at the expense of other books," he said. "If a book isn’t taken up within a month, it is replaced. Ottakar’s, on the other hand, gives books more time to take off. There are two categories of books – the tortoises and the hares. If this deal goes ahead, we will end up with all hares and no tortoises." And it’s not just authors who are apprehensive; figures from across the industry have voiced their concerns. Just last week I spoke to a representative from the Booksellers’ Association, who told me that in his opinion, an Ottakar’s takeover would have a devastating effect on publishers’ chances of introducing debut novelists – or even the lesser-known works of popular authors – to new readers.

And the Ottakar’s story is just the visible face of what is happening to independent bookshops across the UK. Although Ottakar’s is a chain, it shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of the independents. Its branches are locally run by staff who are sensitive to the needs of their local communities and choose their stock accordingly (in contrast with Waterstone’s, which nowadays operates a policy of centralised buying), but it has neither the revenue nor the advertising clout to compete on a pricing basis with the bigger shops. As a result, Ottakar’s have seen their sales and profits falling, making a buyout ever more likely.

I'd been looking for this poem for some time, and finally found it this evening.

  A BED FOR THE NIGHT

– removed. I don't know what the course is, but someone at Cal State can find a proper source for this poem. Don't rely on random blog posts for material.

It’s never pleasant to find out bad things about yourself, and I just did.

I occasionally go over to Marginal Revolution, a weblog run by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen. They are very pro-free-market economics  lecturers and the  weblog attracts a lot of libertarian capitalist types: obviously I disagree with them on just about everything.  I post the odd comment — usually just a short dig at something they say — and then I go again.

So yesterday morning, just before going to work, I took a look, and Alex Tabarrok had just posted a piece on Le problème du pain, asking "why bread isn’t nearly as good in the United States as in Paris". It’s a problem a little bit like why beer was bad in Britain for so long, which is something I recently wrote about. The piece I wrote is called Learning By Drinking, and its point of view is pretty much the opposite of most of those at Marginal Revolution, including Alex T. I was one of the early commenters in the thread, and I put a link to my own piece in my comment. No big deal.

But then Alex Tabarrok added a comment to the thread, and said this [emphasis added]:

… Combined with Tom’s comments about well-informed consumes and the
lemons problem (do read his longer post) I think this could get us
somewhere …

And with that, all kinds of people came over to my site looking at the piece in question. As  I mentioned just the other day, this is a quiet corner of the Internets, getting a handful of visitors each day. But all of a sudden I got 100 visitors yesterday and another 100 or so today, all thanks to Alex Tabarrok. And traffic, where weblogs are concerned, is a Good Thing.

Now I like to think I’m more open minded than these pro-market types, but here is Alex T. sending people my way from his far more popular site to read a piece that he probably disagrees with. And I would not have thought to send people his way without a little dig at whatever it was they wrote. So it begins to look as if he is more open minded and generous than I am. Which obviously can’t be the case because he is on the other side of the political fence from me.

I guess I have to face it. I owe Alex T. a thank you. Come on, you can do it….

"Thank you Alex Tabarrok for recommending people to my web site."

There. Not too bad. Now off to eat some humble pie.

Saturday saw another post on what is surely the best of all weblogs. There’s so much stuff written about Iraq every day, it consistently amazes me that Riverbend’s material gives both a perspective and basic information that I don’t see anywhere else. Plus, she writes ridiculously well. Whoever she is, she’s a hero.

Link: Baghdad Burning.