That article had a lot of words for one word:

Scarcity.

When everyone feels like their might not be enough, they are willing to do anything to get "their fair share." To deepflows's first point, corporations have no moral or ethical directive. The people that control them do. Corporations are a legitimized way for people to take advantage of sociopaths behavior that leads to wealth generation. If we really acted in our specie's best interest all the time wealth (the storage of excess) doesn't really need to happen on the scale modern corporations are capable of.

This isn't an original thought, but I don't remember who said/wrote it. Internet? Can I get a hand on sourcing this?

Hey man, I just wanted to check in. Emotional inventory of people I am sharing a moment with. Not trying to bust your balls.

We drove north. A long way north.

It was February, the roads were shit. It wasn't snowing. It was too fucking cold to snow anymore. The sun was bright overhead, which only illuminated the ice crystals hanging in the air.

"Why does this planet even have a -30 degrees?" Andy was cranky we'd been up way too early to get where we were going. There were three of us in the car. Three of us that were kicking back, listening to the sounds of our childhood. A roadtrip that could only happen in the frozen prairies of Canada. Fueled by double-doubles and a chance to escape. The three of us hadn't done this in a long time.

We were driving to a concert. Once again the band had skipped our hometown. These were guys we knew. We'd been to their shows a half dozen times. Met up, partied, drank. We'd seen some good nights together whether the band knew we had or not.

"Titled axis, total bullshit." I chime in, probably too late for most people to pick up on the joke. But that was us. Rage blew air through is nose, not really a laugh, an acknowledgment of the joke that had been around as long as we had been together.

We finally got to the mall. A mall. They were playing in a fucking mall. We had seen them at Warped Tour, Gilman, House of Blues. They are in Canada in February playing in a fucking mall. Whatever. We made it there and brushed off the cold. Dropped our kit in the overly expensive hotel room upstairs. We toured the mall. Hit the water park and counted the public displays of flesh, of affection and of shame. We laughed. Nothing that was happening here was serious. We left serious back in cowtown. When we decided last night in a haze or drink, bad decisions and late night bravado. Serious business was for someone else.

We left the waterpark, ate too much, drank enough to support the habit and smoked too little. That 4:30 dusk announced that the night was going to be on us soon. We were ready for it. We needed it.

We danced that night. We sang along. We partied and hit on women and picked fights with smiles on our faces. We skanked and rolled and shared like champions. We punched assholes, we grabbed asses and lived ever second of that night.

The houselights came up.

We sobered up.

The last notes of the encore round of "Sell Out" faded into every disgusting corner of that tiny stage inside a huge mall. We walked out into the night with skinned knees, bruised egos and impending hangovers.

Water, naps and Red Bull got us home in a blizzard. It had finally warmed up enough to snow.

We were kings that night.

As odd as this sounds that is a lot of Caribbean cuisine. Fresh fruit, curry, seafood, lime. I think that there is a lot of that flavor combination that exists in the tropical world just because or abundance and the distribution of chilies and fruits. Oh also sugar...lots of sugar in the Caribbean for some reason. cough cough slavery cough

Haha, thanks. I tried once. My prose is awful. You should see me trying to write dialogue. It's like they let a 4 year old loose on a word processor.

Fair enough. But the phenominal thing about monopolies and large companies is that they are very difficult to keep in the position of market leaders. They eventually get out innovated by the market. Even when Microsoft was at its worst and either buying or crushing everything that opposed it in the 90s a company came back and beat them. I mean now Apples is getting pantsed, but beside the point.

The problem isn't that there is something wrong with publishers putting money out marketing and printing books. But with digital distribution, the issue at stake here, what is the problem with a funding model that rewards better click rates? Isn't that the application of the internet funding model on books. We're all okay with bloggers getting paid that way, newspaper and magazine writers getting paid that way, but we've got a problem with self-published novelists?

I know Amazon won't last because the strategy is flawed.

Thank god...i didn't eat a lot yesterday and by the end I was having a hard time even forming a sentence. Poor decisions all around!

Because you're jaded and bitter that you didn't make it rich?

Because there are a mass of people that are willing to grovel in the dirt for the idea of mega-star style success. Because the entertainment industry sells the sizzle not the cow? Even though they promised a herd. That's the actual problem, the idea is that the only success is in dollars and cents. Not in fulfillment, satisfaction and being content.

I sound like a super hippy...I am not...I just think that the first step towards being happy is not being angry because you feel like you're not getting enough. I have run into you a few times now and you are really angry, or at least you have been over the past few days.

Everything okay?

Well lets say the centaur population gets Zion-ed tomorrow afternoon and there are enough to represent a significant population in a country in sub-saharan Africa....Zimbabwe...we'll choose Zimbabwe.

First thing is they become a class of anti-poachers the world has never seen. They take guerrilla tactics and put it on the scale that the poachers couldn't possibly imagine. After stealing weapons caches the populations of wildlife begin to slowly recover.

The centaurs form an economy the is initially based on eco-tourism. Protecting this means remaining armed. Which has never been a huge problem for African countries. The problem has always been about not using them for evil.

Fortunately the centaurs want to preserve the wildlife habitats.

Unfortunately the centaurs have no qualms about killing humans to do it.

This leads to an escalation of conflict in the region as the centaurs attempt to "naturalize" larger portions of the Savannah. The escalation becomes more violent and grisly as the centaurs take on larger populations towards both coasts. This should prompt a response from the international community, but the UN gave the land to the centaurs and they aren't good at doing the right thing. So the international community doesn't intervene and soon South Africa comes into conflict in a fully modernized war against guerilla centaurs. The South Africans loose....really badly.

So now the centaurs control from the Sahara south. Their tactics are impeccable, and even armies of UAVs have trouble tracking and curbing their violence. The centaurs don't advance economy in standard means, instead it is a state based exclusively on ecological preservation. Infrastructure of the post-colonial era collapses. Instead the centaurs population finds an equilibrium. The state becomes the beacon of doing with less. The world pays attention to the violence, but understands the larger story finally. And the next day the G20 countries all announce a plan to fight overpopulation, the root cause of our problems.

Thank you benevolent centaurs! Even if you hate our species, we finally understand what our real problem is and are forced to take real steps to combat it thanks to your shining example.

Thanks half-human-half-horses!

Don't get me wrong I like Harry Potter. But it is hardly some sort of renaissance of literary art. It is the intertwining of two very British literary traditions. The coming of age story and Arthurian legend. If it seems hard to believe think of it this way. Take all the wands, wizards, talking paintings and faeries (the fantasy elements) and you end up with a story of a public school coming of age novel. Probably set from 1938-1945. You take away the public school coming of age and you get a predestined hero being helped by a group of friends to overcome supernatural evil, Arthurian legend. I know that I am oversimplifying but there is no element of the story that is unique in its own right other than the combining of the two stories...which in itself wasn't really original because other authors had done it before see "The Worst Witch" by Jill Murphy.

Was Harry Potter good? Yeah, I think it is very entertaining. Is it literature? No. But then again I think a lot of what counts a literature is worse than Rowling. And don't pretend that the bump in literacy is anything other than the by-product of mass consumerism. Think of all the good we could do if we treated scientists like we treat Bill Nye.

Love the crazy Eddie reference.

Amazon's business strategy is actually "sell Amazon web services."

And why does this mean that everyone has to get paid less? Netflix pays good, really good, money for its content. They put big money into production and they get some good content, some great content and some awful content. They also recycle a lot of content that would have made up syndication. I imagine that the people at Amazon would rather eat Penguin's lunch than make a Netflix in a different medium.

The non-fiction is an angle I'd never considered. Though as a response that I have no reasonable way of checking, don't university presses make a lot of the non-fiction for the academy? As I said, probably wrong, a legitimate question.

And the difference I think that we're thinking of is scale of success. You mention Bieber as the scale of success that you are familiar with, but underground success can make you a living in the music industry, and I think it could be able to with publishing if authors weren't being paid like slaves. The without publishers people would still write, and without record labels the music industry survives because art isn't a commercial product that scales.

The Odyssey was written before publishing. Mozart wrote before record labels.

The difference is the definitions of success...megahits versus supporting yourself. Consumerism in contrast to satisfaction.

I would expect them to be a hunter gatherer society.

Think about it. They would have a hell of a time with agriculture. There would be no end to the problems with planting and I think they would have serious moral issues with keeping horses or bovine.

I think that the majority of their hunting would be done as a speed and pack hunting manner. Think more wolves, less cheetah.

Gathering would still be the large majority of the caloric intake. Having an equine digestive system at the end of their human digestive system would be that they can get along with a lot of grasses.

This means that nomadic lifestyle necessity. They use speed and herd movement as the major forms of defense thanks to the equine lower parts. So the nomadic stuff makes even more sense. It also seems that they wouldn't get much beyond the equatorial regions, maybe in some temperate plains and grass lands, but only as far as they can range before winter.

With the nomadic lifestyle and wide ranging there ends up being spoken language so that knowledge gets passed beyond a generation, this means the ranging can grow again.

Those arms and hands though....I don't know if they ever get to tools unless they are part of raid warfare. They definitely don't get them as a part of their own culture. Think about it. They have those six pack abs because of how hard it is to get the human half close enough to the ground to feed. I can't imagine them spending a long time doubled over to smash rocks against one another to get to rudimentary tools. This means that things like the trade gets centered around slaves, since the centaurs can physically overcome humans and other great apes with ease. So we basically end up with the equatorial regions of Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe harried by slaver centaurs.

The centaurs are kept in check by wily humans that develop advanced technology. But the herds occasionally move through and take human slaves and sell them back. The advent of pikes and bows escalates the wars between humans and centaurs. Eventually civilization triumphs and pushes the centaurs to extremely remote pockets across the globe. They aren't dead, but live on the centaur reserves is a cruel reminder of the cost of survival.

Now their society is non-functional. Everything that it was based on is gone as the ranges are strangled. The oral mysticism is crushed by human education. The century of s system of shitty government "protection" has turned most of their proud species to being reliant on government hand outs. They didn't understand the terms of the peace they bartered, but now they can't even function in it. Their youth are disenfranchised. The future seems hopeless...

So to bring it back.

Nomadic, with advanced language skills, historicity and oral culture. Confined to the equator or the range of the herd(?) within the summer season. Eventually they gather technology through raiding and slave trade. But technology eventually out distances physical might and the culture gets dominated by humans. So today they are essentially the same as aboriginals throughout the world.

At least Canada officially apologized recently. Sorry for what my ancestors did to your ancestors. Sorry that we keep failing. Sorry that we can't even vote to help you anymore...sorry native Canadians.

Guardians of the Galaxy

You are ever introduced to/explained the technology, nova corps, the collector. So much of the movie is just up to you. I mean there are little bits of explanation, but it really is a great example of "science fantasy." It just shows you that the MCU travels as far away as you can imagine and then well beyond. The idea is that there is a rich, full universe all the way in between. Right now we are getting to imagine everything that is in between.

I am the idiot that owns TWO copies of Skyrim for console.

Also I plan on buying Fallout 4 on console. I don't really know why...

I mean mods look like fun an all. But...I want to play the designers' game. They worked, if you listed to programmers, to death to make that game reality. The least I can do is play that game.

That being said it took me 3 years to finish Skyrim...there were soooo many shiny things along the path.

I understand Amazon wanting some quality control. I understand Amazon looking for a "better" model for funding self-published work. Heralding 50 Shades of Grey as a triumph of anything other than discovering that people are more than willing to buy sex is the wrong argument.

I think that the funding model has possibility. No one writes to get rich. Writers write because of the passion for crafting story. Amazon has the means to change the funding model...I say let them. They will get burned. Someone will figure out how to make cash by hacking Kindle hardware and Amazon will bleed for it.

The truth is that traditional publishing doesn't protect nuance or favor art any more than Amazon does. They want to make more. Books of caliber don't make more money necessarily. Popular books do. It will be a cold day in hell when someone finally convinces me that Harry Potter was anything other than derivative pap...but the fact is that every publisher wishes that it was in their catalog. But that derivative pap was entertainment. It was escape. It was something that caught fire with the mass market.

Self publishing will make the model different. Better? Worse? Who knows until we try, I for one welcome our new benevolent overlords and look forward to hacking a "page turner" that will make me rich.

I would love a random loot app from Donjon.

Also, have you ever heard of anyone heavier programs like Realm Works? It seems interesting.

This is why I don't like my Kindle. I read on it a lot. But there is something undeniably awful about not being able to write in the margins of Hemmingway. I know there is a note taking function, but I haven't used it since the first time I realized it was there. Sad, lonely note.

To balance that, I do love having a built in dictionary. Especially one that translates. Even better if it did idioms. I know that doesn't exist, but the first time they make a "figure out why I should be giggling about this Shakespeare passage" in an ebook reader I'll probably find that programmer/team and buy them a beer.

I love Game of Thrones, but I feel like the civilian POV chapter would just be a lot of :

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!

Seriously the amount of conquest, rape and pillaging in the river lands would make it one of the saddest most heartbreaking chapters. And as each book goes on it just gets worse. "Oh man they killed the Stark dude...that sucks."

A few days pass.

"Oh I guess we're at war. Lucky I am nowhere near a castle. Just a farmer growing grain for King's Landing. No one would bother with me."

"Oh I hear that the armies are coming near. But I don't think that it matters, I am just a farmer."

"Oh the Lions burned my crops and killed my son and raped my wife and daughter. Thank goodness they didn't find my silver stash and it seems like my wife and daughter will make it.:("

"Oh the Dire Wolves came by and burned my house...and I can't find my livestock...I still have some coins set aside. :'("

"Oh the Lightning Knight and Kingsmen are taking care of the small folk we're saved!"

"Oh he is dead...and my liege lord is captured...and some of his men came by and took all of my reserve to replant...and my daughter is pregnant...at least a still have a few coins...we might survive."

"Oh and now a new crazier much more brutal person has taken over from Dondarrion. They hung my daughter for sleeping with the Lions....at least I can spend my last few coins to get a crop in the ground."

"Oh and after spending my last few coins winter came...my crops died before they even grew...my wife and I are headed to King's Landing..."

"Oh and the Faith has decided to start shutting down brothels...we're destitute...I envy my son...."

YEAH THAT'S LIFE IN THE SEVEN KINGDOMS. NO ONE WANTS TO READ THAT!

dons tinfoil hat

Imagine you are the Republican Party. You need to make a bunch of candidates look good against Hilary Clinton, the presumed front runner for the Democratic nomination. What do you want to do? You want to make Republican policy look good. You want to silence the critics that will inevitably trot out the "Republicans hate: Minorities, gays, non-Christians, abortion..." list goes on. So instead of waiting for the Democrat soft-money machine to spin up and put all those ideas in the public and force the reaction from all the candidates you stop and think. "What if we got a rich Republican that has access to national airtime and is known for being a bozo so my candidate can differentiate himself from the salacious 'Republican' policies without having to even mention a Democrat. Who do we know that loves the spotlight so much that he is willing to just make an utter ass of himself to make other Republicans look better.....wait! I know a guy."

Enter Donald Trump.

He isn't a candidate. He is an effigy for Republicans to burn in a misguided attempt to make their candidates seem less ridiculous. Seem more ready when compared to Hillary. To seem slightly less like the awkward collection of not-ready for prime time weirdos they've found so far.

removes tinfoil hat

Oooo I like the serendipitous illusion angle. I am thinking that the "fortunate" gathering of heroes that start out training our adventurers should actually be a deeper more nefarious organization.

Thinking about having them actually be trying to send the adventurers on a suicide mission to soak damage while they escape with the loot....all smiles and good times when they are "training" but the real secret of the organization keeps getting deeper and further away.

[I feel like the Tomb of Horrors is already a thing.}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Horrors)

I wonder if there is a way to take this one on and make it fresh again....any suggestions?