Philadelphia Is Destroying Its Public Libraries

Some targeted library branches may be saved

Mayor Nutter said yesterday that five of the 11 library branches once scheduled to close permanently on Thursday are instead on track to be taken over by private foundations, wealthy individuals, companies, and community development corporations.

It was not immediately clear which branches have sponsors and the mayor did not identify the benefactors.

But Nutter expressed confidence that in time private operators could convert each of the branches now on his budget chopping block into community “knowledge centers” that would offer similar or perhaps even superior services to those now available. Though the services would vary from branch to branch, Nutter said the centers would likely retain book collections, computers, and perhaps even trained librarians.

Emphasis added by me.

This guy is certainly true to form to his surname: Nutter.

Hey, how’d you like to have to rely on, say, the Exxon-Mobil Knowledge Center for information about the oil companies?

I could go on in that vein and get really inflammatory, but fuck it, this blog dies tomorrow and I’m burned out as it is doing this.

This is the systematic destruction of the world as we have known it by the same bastards who brought us to this brink.

Are there any men left in America to stop this shit?

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #478: I.D.

Premise: The rich will not be amenable to any solution that essentially reboots the entire worldwide economic system and leaves them holding a bag of shit. A bag of shit, mind you, that everybody else will also wind up holding.

Solving that is not easy …

… why don’t you try it?

Especially all you whiny crybabies who weep for “solutions.”

This is your cue. Go!

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #476: Rules?

Into the Economic Abyss

Many people — including yours truly — have looked to events of 80 years ago to try and figure out how things might play out in future. But maybe it isn’t necessary to go back that far. There have been other economic implosions in more recent times that might offer lessons that are just as illuminating. In fact, one of my regular visitors, Jason, suggested that I check out a blog, Surviving in Argentina, published by an anonymous Argentinean, which offers up some disturbing but absorbing accounts of life in that beleaguered Latin American nation. After reading a post written a few weeks ago, entitled “Despair in Once-Proud Argentina,” it made me wonder whether we will see an equally calamitous ending here.

If this account doesn’t make you cry, please do the rest of us a favor and kill yourself. You are too deluded to face reality — or you’re one of the sociopathic pathogens infecting this nation.

A few clips:

“I can’t explain it, and maybe I never will be able to[.] [. . .] But maybe you can start to figure out why. You have to wonder: Is all this really happening? Are our politicians so corrupt? Are we now really so poor? Have the banks really stolen our money? And the answers are yes, yes, yes and yes.”

And:

“Am I proud of what we did? No, of course not. Would I do it again? Yes, of course. You start to live by different rules.“

Emphasis in the original.

With each post, I am trying to plant into your head in ways that cannot be avoided how absolutely horrific the breakdown of our advanced society can — will — be.

Because I don’t want it to happen to us!

“You can’t know what it’s like to see your children hungry and feel helpless to stop it,” she said. “The food is there, in the grocery store, but you just can’t afford to buy it anymore. My husband keeps working, but he keeps bringing home less and less. We never had much, but we always had food, no matter how bad things got. But these are not normal times.”

Emphasis added by me.

I paused while creating this post to read the comments for it. That caused me to add my own Comment, which is a fitting way to end this post:

Jesus Christ.

If I read one more whiny crybaby “Offer us solutions!!!” post, I’ll scream. OK, I’m screaming NOW.

WTF is wrong with you lot?

You’ve been given the very rare privilege here of seeing the breakdown of an advanced society into absolute horror. Some of you are thinking, unsaid, “Oh, it’s just those effing spicks, that’s how they are!” The other lot are thinking, “Hey, my gun will be my passport!”

Both of you are unfit for survival with what’s coming up.

Your “solution” — such as it will be — is YOU. What the hell do you think made this country, a pack of crybabies telling the proto-revolutionaries, “Oh, give us a solution EXCEPT overthrowing Old George”?!

Your money is shit.
Your gold is shit.
Your gun is shit.

Start there and YOU can begin to CREATE some solutions.

FA, thanks much for this post. I’m linking to it.

And so I have.

Update: For those who will stupidly dismiss this account because it’s from a “Doom site,” here’s the original source: The Washington Post!

The Loudness Of Dust Settling

The Axe, the Book, and the Ad

A friend (and author) called me recently after visiting a large bookstore in Northern California and, his voice suitably hushed, told me that, on a weekday, he had been the only customer in sight. That’s typical of the nightmarish tales about traffic in bookstores and book sales now ripping through my world as 2008 ends.

Emphasis added by me.

Why is this a surprise?

Back on June 20, 2008, I posted:

Even at Shakespeare & Co.’s NoHo store (which used to have great stock; and which now doesn’t).

But they weren’t.

And then I looked around.

And, dear God almighty!, the stores should have had tumbleweeds running through them because they were like abandoned ghost towns!

This was all in Manhattan.

This has never, ever happened before.

Even in past recessions, I’ve seen people in books stores. The places were alive. Now they are dead.

Which now really amps up my contempt for the shitheads running the dying dinosaurs of print.

Do you ever get out of your fucking offices and visit the places that actually sell your books?

How could you miss the fact the loudest noise you’ll hear in those bookstores is the sound of dust settling?

eBooks grew at over seventy percent in the last year.

Why isn’t that a big enough hint for you lot to change course? To sound the Red Alert klaxon and get busy as all hell adapting to the new marketplace? Is it your intent to avoid being where your customers are?

All of you former publishing employees — again: If you’re such hot shit, Get It Done.

England Needs Serious Sorting Out

Father-of-three cancer sufferer beaten to death as he prepared to spend his last Christmas with family

He was diagnosed with bowel cancer in February last year and underwent surgery and chemotherapy, but the spread of the disease could not be halted and he was told in June this year that he was terminally ill.

What the hell has happened to that country?

And how can they let this shit go on week after week after week?

Businesses: Smugness = Lost Customers!

You would think, here in the 21st century, companies would realize people talk to one another all the time now.

And also, with the economy turning blue worldwide, companies would want to hold onto customers.

Here’s a clue, lulu, from the recently-deceased Randy Pausch:

Words, by the way, we haven’t heard uttered by anyone getting bailout money.

December Seventh

In 1941:

In 2008, sixty-seven years later, we have our automakers going before Congress like crying children, beg-beg-begging for handouts.

This is what they should have done for all those past sixty-seven years:

They really are a disgrace to this nation and to everyone who died in that war.

Blind For Over Twenty-Five Years

At the dawn of the 1980s, I worked for the top consultancy in electronic media (oh yes, electronic media existed way back then!).

One of the executives there immediately saw that newspapers were going to have their classified ad revenues snatched away by online competitors.

And now this:

Ad losses send industry into a tailspin

Across the United States, more than 30 daily newspapers are for sale, and buyers are scarce.

From Los Angeles to New York, leading newspapers have slashed newsrooms with buyout offers, and when those failed to reach budget-cutting goals, with layoffs.

The newspaper industry has been caught in a tailspin for three years, a trend variously blamed on plummeting ad revenues, declining readership, growing competition from the Internet and a deepening national recession.

Emphasis added by me.

See? Their blindness continues. “Three years?” It’s been over twenty-five!

Many newspapers were clients of that consultancy too!

Here’s the key bit:

The main culprit in the newspaper business decline: shrinking classified-ad sections.

Newspapers depend on advertising for about four-fifths of their revenue, and at big-city dailies, the classifieds used to bring in half of that money.

Through 2005, print-advertising revenues grew nationwide, according to Newspaper Association of America data. But the industry took a $5 billion loss in advertising dollars during the next two years, and this year could be much worse.

In the third quarter of 2008, print-advertising revenues were down 28 percent from the third quarter of 2005. Most of that loss came in the classifieds.

“The heart of the matter is losing classified advertising to various electronic competitors,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute in Florida. “First, it was gradual. Now, it’s precipitous.”

Emphasis added by me.

eBooks have existed for well over a decade, beginning with the widespread sales of the Palm Pilot, back in 1996.

Dying dinosaurs of print book publishing: Wake up!

Be Social Like A Disease #2

Over at mj’s always thought-provoking blog, I came across:

What the f**k is Social Media? by @mzkagan

From which I am stealing several slides:

I can understand why it’s only 32% of bloggers being trusted. Too many are sell-outs. I scourged this issue at my old blog:

I’m Beginning To Think There Isn’t A Single Tech Site That Can Be Trusted

Blog Notes: Aiiiiieeeeee!!

So This Is The Future? I Don’t Think So!

You Suckers. I Told You And Told You And Told You.

My Response To “10 Things Your Blogger Won’t Tell You”

PayPerScum

There are slicksters — as well as dim mouth-breathers — in this world who will sell out their own souls for a bit of spotlight or money.

Fuck that shit.

If something is good — I will rave about it.

If something is shit — the company will wish it was never put on sale.

That’s how it should be.

I have little patience for dimwits who are “afraid to offend.” Open your eyes: Companies need us to spread the word. Their ads no longer do it.

I have no patience for bottom-feeding scum who will sell their readers an image of honesty yet actually sell them out by disguising bad reviews in couched terms (“Well, we’re sure hope v2 will be better!” — translation: v1 is shit, but we want the free loot and egotastic access to this company to continue!).

Fuck that shit.

I don’t believe in reviews. I don’t believe reviewers.

Who is this person standing there passing judgment? What is this person’s ongoing record? How did he get access to what he’s reviewing? Who does he work for and who does he want to work for?

Bloggers can build up a trust and a record no reviewer can. Because we have a constant stream of past commentary and opinion to see and judge.

What makes me laugh about the straits the dying dinosaurs of print find themselves — justifiably! — in has been their reliance upon “official reviewers.”

I spit on those reviewers.

Who the fuck are they?

Some other writer whose own work doesn’t sell yet is getting a few bucks to pay his rent by trashing someone else’s work? Reviewing another writer whose work is actually better — but, as a “reviewer,” there can’t be all praise, can there? No. That’d make the “reviewer” look like a pushover.

Fuck that shit.

As I wrote in Print Book Publishing: DOOMED:

Reviews? Do you know how many books I discovered via the New York Times Book Review? Probably less than ten. Because the so-called “reviews” were invariably more about the reviewer and how allegedly “smart” he (and it was always a he) was than the book under review. Face the fact that the NYTBR was — and still is — nothing a but a circle-jerk fanzine for your little clique. It had little to do with gaining new book readers.

And in the source article, the dying dinosaurs of print are clutching their pearls and whining:

“Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter[.]”

Welcome to the twenty-first century, baby!

We’ve overthrown your Top-Down Command-and-Control system.

I don’t kid myself that the people I exchange words with over the Net are “friends,” but they are people whose judgment I would give more weight to than any “review” or promotion or ad.

Because they all have track records with me.

And I have one with them.

And you, dying dinosaurs of print? Your record is one of FAIL.

You can’t even get social marketing done right.

Nor can you manage a simple pickup of a review book copy.

And yet you wonder why the layoffs continue and sales plummet?

Your companies aren’t being killed. They’re committing suicide!

Turmoil At Major Print Publishers

Major Reorgnization from Random House; Applebaum and Rubin Out

Rubin, Irwyn Applebaum Out in RH Reorg

Heads of New Publishing Groups at Random House Will Handle Layoffs Themselves

Thomas Nelson Cuts 54 Positions

Live image of the dying dinosaurs of print:

OMFGZZZZ!!!! It’s reality!!!!!!1111111