Archive for April 7, 2011

Nate Silver: Budget Politics in the Doldrums

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2 years ago
by Monotreme in

Those of you who have been miss­ing Nate Silver’s FiveThir­tyEight columns since the New York Times went behind a (par­tial) pay­wall might want to spend one of your 20 “free” gan­ders at his lat­est col­umn, “Bud­get Pol­i­tics in the Dol­drums.”

With a gov­ern­ment shut­down loom­ing, Nate makes an obser­va­tion, fol­lowed by a prediction:

  • Obser­va­tion: the pub­lic (save polit­i­cal junkies, like yours truly) isn’t pay­ing much atten­tion to the bud­get bat­tles in Washington.
  • Pre­dic­tion: if a gov­ern­ment shut­down takes place, people’s atten­tion will rapidly focus on the bud­get bat­tles, and the fickle pub­lic will quickly assign blame (in a not per­fectly pre­dictable, sto­chas­tic way).

Now would be a good time, and here would be a good place, to lay down your mark­ers. How do you think this will play out?

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Our Soul Reponsibility

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2 years ago
by filistro in

Libraries are won­der­ful places…but they’re a lousy deal for writ­ers. When a library buys your book, you get one roy­alty. Then hun­dreds of peo­ple get to read your book for free, earn­ing you no roy­al­ties at all. The Cana­dian gov­ern­ment rec­og­nizes this essen­tial unfair­ness and takes steps to reim­burse writ­ers through a pro­gram called Pub­lic Lend­ing Right, oper­ated and funded by the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts. Every year, the PLR sends a team out to inves­ti­gate dozens of ran­domly selected libraries across the coun­try. They search the cat­a­logs for copies of your books, and every time they find one they record it as a “hit” and pay you a set amount for each. This year a sin­gle hit was worth an aver­age of about $44, based on how long the book had been reg­is­tered with the PLR. The checks arrive promptly every Feb­ru­ary, and can be pleas­antly sub­stan­tial. 41 coun­tries have some sys­tem to reim­burse writ­ers for books in libraries. Coun­tries with­out PLR plans include the United States, and all of South Amer­ica, Asia and Africa. The PLR is just one exam­ple of the many ways var­i­ous nations in the world seek to sup­port the arts—and pro­vide tan­gi­ble assis­tance and encour­age­ment to their cit­i­zens who work in the arts and the humanities—because they rec­og­nize the vital national impor­tance of these activities.

(more…)

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