Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).

The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.

It's probably more about ego than money for the high-level people. Since people are cheap (because "passion") they can have large teams under them without their organizations having to pay the typical costs of large teams.

The truth about it, though, is that the culture is too balkanized for any of this stuff to make sense. Very few people go out of their way to read or find the best books; for good or for bad, they've all self-segregated into warring genres and subgenres--and the so-called "literary" crowd who insist their genre is not a genre are often the worst in this regard. The balkanization is probably why no one knows how to market books anymore; people really understand a small slice of the total readership and, in any case, the lines are always changing.

Now, is it unfair that the compensation component is so low that people who don't have other means of income effectively can't take the job? Personally, I don't think so. I would love to research butterflies 24/7 and if I was independently wealthy perhaps would, but I completely understand that demand for butterfly research doesn't generate enough funding to make it possible to do that and lead the life I live now.

FWIW, from my limited experience leadership were all perfectly lovely people, extremely passionate about publishing as well, who in some cases had worked all of these "drummed up" jobs themselves on their way up the ladder.

The stereotype in NYC of publishing is of it attracting young, well-educated daughters of families who can subsidize New York living beyond the low salaries.

Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.

To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).

If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.

If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.

In theory, publishers provide a real service, because self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily). In theory, they should be offering access to people who couldn't afford what it costs to self-publish to the expected standard. In practice? The only people who can get in are people who have the connections and financial resources not to need the help. Whoops.

What we're learning about publishing (which we already knew, those of us who've been studying it) is that no one is good at selling books. Most self-publishers aren't, most traditional publishers aren't, and most PR firms are only good at taking and spending your money. We just don't have a good understanding of why individuals buy books (it changes) and there's a lot of evidence, sadly, that book sales are only loosely correlated to the quality of the writing (in the long term, quality matters more, but a book that dies in the short term won't have a long term).

This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a halfway decent copy editor for about $500-$1000. Tools like Scrivener can handle all the ebook and paper edition formatting for you, with built-in templates, so that's another $100 or so for the tooling, but you can reuse this for future books. Publishing to Amazon and other places (like Smashwords) is free, and this includes print-on-demand paperback copies as well.

What it does take is a lot of time for learning how to use all the tools and to navigate the many options available for covers, editing, etc.

As far as marketing expenses go, there are no good ways to spend money to sell books. I think you're correct that nobody knows how to do it. If you don't win the lottery and get featured on a celebrity's book club, how is anyone supposed to ever know that you even released a book?

I am of the mindset that the decent functioning of human society is an entitlement and that people who deliberately cause dysfunction (such as Davos assholes, who are deliberately destroying the U.S. middle class to set some weird kind of example) should be treated as reneging criminals and removed from power using whatever means are necessary. Some people coat doorknobs in feces (or, say, found companies with terrible cultures, support capitalism past its deserving end-of-life) simply because they enjoy the thrill of being the cause; others among us, people of culture, are entitled to a society that protects us from the fecal spreaders. That's literally why we permit the state to exist; so it will protect us. However, it does a terrible job these days.

But yes, it is true that, absent the existence of human society, I am owed nothing (since the lions and gazelles and wolves clearly owe me nothing).

Life under 21st-century American capitalism is bad, but it's even worse outside of the imperial core. Two things can both be true.

"Sprints" are supposed to be humiliating. The very message is that you're not trusted with even two fucking weeks of your own (!!) working time. It could not be clearer. If you work in sprints, it's because the higher-ups think you're a child and a loser, and you'll never be able to overcome that negative inference, because if you perform poorly you will confirm it and if you perform well, you will confirm that their micromanagement actually works--there is no winning.

Also, "Waterfall" never really existed. It was a straw man invented to sell this Agile bukkake.

In any case, a number of the dysfunctions are, in effect, intentional. Standups that go on for 45+ minutes? Long meetings are a classic way for managers to punish perceived underperformers (or, in Agile terms, "impediments") when they're not entirely sure who problem player is. The theory is that the rest of "the team" (I put this term in quotes because coworkers in corporate aren't an actual team--that's just management speak--but are often pitted against each other) will get sick of the incessant meetings and rat out the underperformer who is causing this wastage of time. The humiliations of Jira and "user stories" aren't bureaucratic accidents that occurred in good faith; they hurt because they're supposed to hurt.

That part is true.

> It was a straw man invented to sell this Agile bukkake.

That part is colorful, but retconning. A fellow named Royce coined the term in 1970 and used it as a strawman for common project iteration organization (V-model?) a the time.

I agree with most of the spirit of the rest of the parent's screed, though not with all the details.

For most of us poors, money is a tool we need to survive. For the people who have the bulk of it, it's a weapon. And we're the targets. They love blowing us up; it's what they do. They care more about making others suffer than the material comforts (to which hedonic adaptation accrues quick) money affords. Putting the few "good jobs", the few jobs that offer us even a sliver of a chance (like 1%, but we're expected to work as if it were 95%) of being something more than an exploited worker, in congested and dysfunctional expensive cities is something they do because it's hilarious to them.

Barring a complete and final overthrow of corporate capitalism, you can't escape this crapsack world. The important land is already owned by reptilian shitasses. Billions of people are going without drinking water while a bunch of psychopaths fly around in private jets, destroying the planet because they find it comical.

Not really.

Let's set up a quick boundary condition. Since you mentioned most people, you're talking about the lower-middle and middle classes. Let's keep the discussion on them. The working poor have it bad almost everywhere, and I think we both agree that there's more that can be done in most countries to support them.

For someone with a median household income, it's still very much possible to finding housing that is less than 25-30% of their household income. This is true even in high cost of living (HCOL) areas. Now, there are some cities or sections of cities that are unaffordable for someone with a median income, but these are very much the exceptions.

To put it simply, if you have a median household income for your country, in almost all locations in almost all OECD countries, you earn enough to follow a household budget that allows you to save 15-20% of your take home pay. If you can't save a portion of your income and you're not living off of a below-average wage, it's very likely that you either made decisions that aren't conducive to saving (e.g., you're house poor, car poor, or your discretionary spending is too high).

> along with healthcare in the US

Quality health care is expensive in most countries. The US has its own set of issues that make health care more expensive than in most other countries (e.g., population density), but it's not orders of magnitude higher. It's also offset by the higher salaries that people in the US earn over, say, the average EU state.

The ONLY way to prevent this is to either stop offering loans or force savings in some way (taxes, etc). But apparently both those options are off the books.

This is how the system is actually designed. Social security is a mandatory annuity/savings and disability insurance program. Many countries also have mandatory contributions into their 401K (OECD Pillar 2) equivalents.

Even in the US, where these contributions are mandatory, the tax code is set up to make them extremely desirable for the employer and the employee.

> loans for everything is standard now

Stopping this would be as simple as having an indebtedness line added to the tax code. In many countries, there is a maximum level of debt that a person is allowed to carry. Companies aren't allowed to issue new debt if the repayment for all of their current debt exceeds some percentage of their income.

But you're right, there's no political will to do anything like this since consumer debt helps to fuel the economy.

Henry Ford wasn't a good person. He was a rabid antisemite. But even he knew that he wouldn't be able to sell cars indefinitely if people couldn't afford to buy them, so he raised wages. The bosses, as a class, no longer have to do this. They can make enough fake money out of debt to keep their businesses alive. So that's what they're doing.

All this means we get artificial mediocre prosperity that is contingent on their piles of money getting bigger (i.e., all economic growth, meager as it has been, goes to them). And we know that they are willing to crash everything (or, to give an example that has actually happened, make lots of people sick with Covid-19) to keep themselves in charge and their piles of money growing bigger.

If the consumer debt game ended for some reason, the whole system would collapse immediately.

It is about 2-3x higher, which is not an order of magnitude, but is less than an order of magnitude away from being an order of magnitude.

Not, in any way, comforting unless our outcomes are 2-3x better, which they are not.

It's really not, at least when you compare OECD countries with one another.

For instance, per capita healthcare spending in the US is 11.4K. The OECD average is around 5.7K

Now, there are a lot of reasons for this gap:

1. Salaries are higher in the US. Health care workers are much better compensated there than, say, in France or Spain.

2. The US has a much lower population density. There are a lot of fixed costs with health care. There are real cost advantages to having a large majority of your population in dense urban areas.

3. The US is first to market/first to adoption for a lot of medical innovation. The R&D costs for anything health care related are enormous. Early adopters bear the brunt of these costs.

4. The US has a hybrid health care model. The two countries that use this model, the US and Switzerland, are one and three respectively for per capita health care spending.