Uniformity and Diversity--Amazon's Kindle

I've mentioned my cousin's book, Dueling Dragons. As part of my help to her I've gotten a fair amount of exposure to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing operation.  (The book was published iby CreateSpace, which Amazon bought years ago and now has dropped in favor of KDP.) 

With the paperback version out, we now have to worry about the ebook version.   This leads me into some thoughts about the whole publishing process.  In the old world of publishing, say circa 1960, each hardcover book was handcrafted with lots of choices in its design and packaging.  The paperbacks were a bit different with less variety, especially in the cases where a publisher had a series going.  (I remember Ballantine's series of World War II histories as one example, or a series of John D. MacDonald's novels.)

I paid very limited attention to self-publishing.  It was around, and advertised in the pages of the NY York Times Book Review.  I think it required a rather hefty payment to get a batch of your book printed and available for sale.

These days with Amazon ebook publishing you have very limited choices in font and design.  But what this standardization does, along with the support of software and the internet, is enable a much greater variety in the content of books, partially because the costs of publishing in ebook format are so low.  Because the entry cost is low as long as you can live the with limited choices everyone and her brother can publish that book they've dreamed of.

This interplay of uniformity and diversity fascinates me, and I think you can find similar patterns in other areas.

Promises Kept and Victories Won?

Marc Thiessen has an oped in the Post claiming that President Trump has kept his promises, kept them better than any other president.  His second sentence is "He lies all the time."  That's a fitting description for Trump.

After reading Thiessen I ran across another piece, the url for which I've now lost.  The thesis was this:
in many House districts, particularly those won by Clinton and by a Republican representative in 2016, Trump's "wins" are unlikely to appeal to the centrist voters the Republican nominee in 2018 needs to win.  In many cases, perhaps most recently with judge Kavanaugh, a "win" may increase the odds of a Republican defeat in the House.

We'll see.

Farmers.gov Shows Promise

I've probably been skeptical of some FSA automation efforts, but I am impressed by a brief trip through the farmers.gov disaster app.  I got there from this tweet, plugged in some fake data for a hurricane in Buncombe County, NC, and got a reasonable result. (Only NAP available--I'd suspect county employees would like to see some qualifications--like the limitations on NAP coverage.  Otherwise the farmer may be overly optimistic when coming through the door.)

There's lots of room to improve, but it's a good start.  The question will be whether they can get enough traffic to the site to get good feedback.

Dentists and the Healthcare System

Went to the dentist today.  Not my favorite way to spend the afternoon.  Growing up I think I saw a dentist once or twice--it wasn't a thing for my family.  Consequently I've some irregular teeth, which is appropriate since I'm an irregular person.  A couple appointments ago my dentist asked about braces.  I barely restrained my laughter--not at my age.

Anyway I had a couple fillings while in the Army, then mostly avoided dentists again until my first wisdom tooth decayed and needed to be extracted.  I eventually hooked up with my wife's dentist--he was a monosyllabic single practitioner who did all his own work, perfectly fitted my preferences.  But then he retired and I had to find a new one, which I eventually did in Reston.

For the first time I started looking to my healthcare insurance to pay part of the dental costs.  It's strange because Kaiser, my health insurance company with which I'm very satisfied, doesn't do dentistry as it does other health issues, by employing its own dentists.  Instead they contract with a dental insurance company.

So the bottomline is there's three parties involved, four when you count my teeth.  Ordinarly I think of myself as an informed consumer, but not now, not with these players.  Instead when my dentist speaks, I salute and say "yes, ma'am", take my medicine and pay whatever bill is presented.  (A slight exaggeration--I just vetoed a separate appointment for a small filling in favor of combining it with my next 3-month (3-month!!) appointment.  But it turns out the three parties have their own problems in keeping their paperwork straight.  My dentist tried to explain the confusion to me (she didn't have a receptionist--hard to get help these days) but failed--I just paid the bill.

My bottom line: as with my sister years ago, I'm amazed by the administrative dysfunction of our healthcare system.

ACRSI Comments

FSA has ACRSI data collection out for comment in the Federal Register:

Need and Use of the Information: This initiative is being conducted in phases by geographical area and additional commodities. Counties are selected based on their commonality of historical crop reporting, high percentage of producers participating in both RMA and FSA programs and the high level of interest of the private agricultural service industry (precision-ag and farm management) in the pilot phases. It will reengineer the procedures, processes, and standards to simplify commodity, acreage and production reporting by producers, eliminate or minimize duplication of information collection by multiple agencies and reduce the burden on producers, insurance agents and AIPs. Information being collected will consist of, but not be limited to: Producer name, location state, commodity name, commodity type or variety, location county, date planted, land location (legal description, FSA farm number, FSA track number, FSA field number), intended use, prevented planting acres, acres planted but failed, planted acres, and production of commodity produced. Failure to collect the applicable information could result in unearned Federal benefits being issued or producers being denied eligibility to program benefits.

Description of Respondents: Individuals and households.

Number of Respondents: 501,012.

Frequency of Responses: Reporting: One time.

Does Obsessive Reading Have a Future?

A common theme of interviews with writers, at least those in the NYTimes Book Review, is reading habits.  A common response is: I was an obsessive reader, reading anything from an early age.  That would be my response, if only I were a writer.

But will that be the response in the future?  I'm teased into that question by a news piece about a scholar of some sort, perhaps a philosopher, who found her reading habits and capabilities had been so changed by our social media she couldn't do a long session with a serious book.

Thinking back to my own experience in childhood--there were few children around in the neighborhood so I found a refuge in books, reading everything in the house and that came in the mail.  But assume I'd had a PC and access to the internet--certainly I'd have devoted less time to reading and more to the internet.  Whether the availability of all the material on the internet would have completely disrupted my reading I don't know.

Our Easily Forgotten Past Divisions

I've tweeted to this effect, but Noah Smith does a thread on the same point: American history is filled with episodes of violence and division. 

SCOTUS Prediction

By this time in 2020 I don't think the Kavanaugh appointment will be much of an issue.  Roe v Wade will still be good law, although the Court likely has a mixed record in approving new restrictions on abortion. ]

[Update: some additional thoughts--the dog which won't bark, which no one is talking about today, is the overturning of a couple Supreme Court decisions, decisions of much more recent vintage than Roe v Wade--specifically the Windsor and Obergefell  decisions legalizing gay marriage.  That surprises but pleases me.  But then, almost everything about the history of gay marriage surprises me.  If you'd asked me in the mid-90's how things would work out, I'd have said at best gay marriage would be another issue like abortion--everlasting. But it's not become that.  What we now call gay rights is still an issue, and that will continue but marriage itself is not.]

Safeway's Self-Checkout and Driverless Cars

Vox has a long piece on the problems with self-checkout.

I have been a fan of self-checkout, which I use regularly at Safeway, but I'm getting less enthusiastic. My local Safeway has probably had self-checkout for 10 years or so.  You'd think that the system would keep working indefinitely but not so.  I suppose it's probably the hardware getting unreliable, but it seems like the software.  It's most noticeable when handling produce--hitting the icons for entering a code or selecting from a screen I often (it seems often) given a system error--needing a sales attendant.

My experience with the self-checkout raises some questions with driverless cars.  My assumption has been that the system will always improve--any problem in the software which turns up will be fixed on all the cars using the software.  But Safeway argues for the law of entropy.  While the software may endure, the underlying hardware and the accessories for input/output won't endure.  They'll degrade. 

I can switch my argument again by pointing to airplanes.  Boeing and Airbus also have a combination of hardware and software which is used over years and years, and they seem to have solved the problem of degrading hardware.  Elon Musk notoriously didn't pay much attention to the experience of established carmakers; I wonder if he will similarly ignore the plane makers.

Robotic Farms?

Technology Review writes about a hydroponics lettuce farm in San Francisco using robots to do some (much?) of the work.  I understand the logic, but as the article observes, such enterprises require a lot of capital upfront. Maybe there's a lot of capital sloshing around the world, enough to get a robotic farm up, running, and profitable.  We'll see. 

Part of the pitch for the robots is the difficulty of getting labor, especially with the current administration's crackdown on immigration.