Steve Taylor:
Or are there barriers to having a bank account in the US if you're poor?
No one seems to have directly answered this for you. Yes, there are practical barriers to having a bank account in the US if you're poor. Very few banks are interested in low-end retail banking; there are fees for everything if you don't maintain a minimum balance much higher than someone with low-end unreliable employment can manage. Monthly fees for having the account, fees for deposits, fees for writing checks or making withdrawals, etc. It's a constant eating away of your money--and the monthly fees apply even when you haven't got any money coming in. And that's in addition to the ID requirements, which have grown more stringent in the last few years, and can be more alarming to people at the bottom of the economic scale regardless of whether they actually have anything to hide.
And so the wretchedly predatory check-cashing business thrive. They are in reality even more expensive than having a bank account--but the check-cashing customer only pays when they HAVE a check to cash.
At least in Massachusetts, I don't whether it may be true elsewhere, too, there's a law requiring free basic checking and savings accounts for senior citizens, but the rest of us are on our own in finding banking services that don't seem too expensive to maintain. (One of the interesting wrinkles is that a mortgage--money you owe the bank--can usually be counted towards your "minimum balance" for the purpose of avoiding or reducing fees. Another example of how having more can save expenses those with less can't avoid.)
Just as much as the next liberal, I like seeing Rush made miserable, but I also just want to point out here that a significant chunk of what's making him miserable here is laws that make a whole lot of other people miserable too.
Yes, Avram, and he's strongly in favor of those laws--when they are making other people miserable.
Hoist on his own petard--except that, somehow or other, he won't be. He'll get off.
Gore always knew how to get maximum mileage out of his "Al Gore is completely wooden" image. Someone without a sense of humor about himself, and/or without a good sense of comic timing, can't do that.
Teresa, what's to live down? Most of us can't write like that when we're sober!
(I'd say that none of us can, but this makes me wonder what hidden talents other people have.)
Go, do that thing that fandom does so well.
(Cue evil maniacal laughter)
"...a regime of Compulsory Editorial Credit."
I guess this is the bit that really throws me. I can't see how making it a standard practice to name the editor could possibly be construed as punitive. And I think you'll agree that it is somewhat harder to nominate someone on the basis of their excellent work, if you don't know who they are or can't match them up with their excellent work.
John, NESFA does list all of those people, somewhere in the book or on the dustcover. (Of course, it may fairly be pointed out that that's all we get for our work--credit.)
Richard, yes, an awful lot of work is involved even when the author's text is already in final form when the editor first sets to work on the book (which is the case with most NESFA Press books.) I conclude that there's a considerably greater amount of work involved when the novel isn't yet written when it's sold. (And I think we can all identify cases of great writers who nevertheless clearly needed their editors--how many people can edit their own prose objectively and effectively?) I want it to be easier for us to identify these people and credit them for their contribution to our reading pleasure.
On the subject of the Best Editor Hugo: we're now including the name of the book editor in the NESFA list--when we know who that is, hint, hint, nudge, nudge. Yes, I know Tor does identify the editor for some of its books. The problem is that "some of," plus the fact that other publishers mostly don't.
The editor of a novel does tend to be less visible than the editor of a magazine or an anthology. Maybe the publishers could give us a little more help? For instance, maybe some publisher could start listing the editor on all their books, and possibly create some social pressure for other sf publishers to do the same?
Fandom could really use a short fiction index/recommender system.
NESFA maintains "recommended reading" lists that are an effort to make more visible the stuff that we, at least, think is good. It's not just short fiction, but it includes the short fiction categories. Current and past lists are available here:
http://www.nesfa.org/recommends/
There are other lists out there in cyberspace, too, although I'm not sure how many of them you'd stumble across if you didn't already know where to look for them.
It's good to have friends with problem-solving abilities. It's a relief to read this.
Jon, we work hard to schedule things that way. Doesn't work every year, but, ideally, yes, the Annual Boskone Blizzard is long enough before the convention so that people's travel plans aren't disrupted, or else after everyone is already at the hotel.
(What, you thought Snokone was an accident?)
Still snowing here, too.
Unfortunately, I am the landlady. (How did that happen?!)
Around noon, I went out and shoveld the front walk because the snow seemed to have slowed down a lot. Alas, it was only temporary, and you can't tell now that I was ever out there. And sometime later today, I'm going to have to not only shovel the walk again, but cleaer the parking lot--hopefully with the help of my neighbors and their handy little plow.
Well, at least we got spring this year, even if it was in January and the first half of February. Better than no spring at all, right?
Oh, I'm so sorry. Arthur sounds like a wonderful hamster.
I do have visions of him running around hamster heaven, bragging about the really _nice_ home his pet humans got him, and how they loved him enough that he had to get so big to accommodate all that love.
Hey, we're a science fiction convention; we have the power to schedule conventions in hotels that don't exist yet!
Actually, I can oversee the progress of the construction from my office window, and although we'll be one of their earlier sizable events, they're scheduled to be open about eight months prior to that.
The history of Boskone hotels, ignoring little issues of how long it was in each hotel, and a couple of times when we bounced back and forth, is roughly: Statler-Hilton (Boston), Sheraton Rolling Green (Andover), Sheraton Boston (Boston), Radisson Ferncroft (Danvers), Boston Park Plaza (Boston), Copley Marriott (Boston), Sheraton Boston (Boston), Sheraton Tara & Springfield Marriott (Springfield), Sheraton Tara (Framingham), Sheraton Boston (Boston).
Next year will be in the Westin Waterfront (Boston).
I'll be at Boskone, running the hucksters room this year, so I'll be fairly easily findable, and not constantly running off to get another kaffeeklatsche off to a smooth start.
I'd like to think that troubles come in giant economy packs so that you can deal with them more efficiently, all together, get them out of the way, and not have them cluttering up way more of your life by coming by ones and twos.
Is there a possibility of hooking up with the new neurologist wherever he's going? And if not, can he recommend someone? (I know, painfully obvious, and you're already pursuing these possibilities. I'm just searching for something useful and helpful to say, because "I'm sorry" seems so feeble.)
Maybe the whole pack of us will have come up with something more useful to say by Boskone.
(Eric Flint tells of his headache in chasing the rights to a short story by C. M. Kornbluth -- eventually he managed, on the fourth attempt, to get a partner in a big literary agency to actually open the fricking filing cabinet and confirm that they had, indeed, inherited Kornbluth's estate from another agent when they'd died -- nobody at the agency had actually heard of Kornbluth before Eric went digging, which is why his work's been so thin on the ground of late.)
Charlie, I'm mildly curious as to when this might have been, considering that NESFA has had all of Kornbluth's solo short fiction in print since 1997, and last summer a call to the agency to inquire about two of his novels fairly quickly put me in touch with the responsible agent.
If you know that you want to find Kornbluth's stories, typing his name into Amazon.com will pull up quite a few in-print and out-of-print possibilities. It's not the stuff you already know about that's the problem; in or out of print, you can probably find it. It's the stuff you don't know about, and are unlikely to stumble across accidentally. If the heirs don't understand what a standard publishing contract looks like, and don't understand that any money from old, out-of-print fiction is found money, the hassles involved in getting it back into print can exceed any possible reward.
I have to be, don't I, in order to be making this argument at all. If innocent people are killed, and I know that they are, that is bad. Every possible thing not only should but must be done to prevent that. And then we have to take a deep breath and accept that we're human, that mistakes can be made, and that we have to take responsibility for them.
And what would that look like, "taking responsibility" for having executed an innocent person because you really, truly, completely sure that they one of those who needed to "be put out of their misery" because of t/h/e/i/r/ someone else's heinous acts? Wearing sackcloth and ashes? Feeling really bad? Paying substantial monetary reparations to the family of the innocent who was executed? Saying "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs?
Yes, Carrie, we DO need to accept the fact that we're fallible, and we need to accept moral responsibility for the decisions we choose to make knowing we're fallible. And that means there are some things that, if you do them, you HAVE to be right. You can't excuse yourself by saying, oh, gee, we were so sure... Knowingly choosing to kill a human being, when that human being is not an immediate threat to you or anyone else, and there are other options available to you for minimizing the potential future danger you believe this person represents, because you have decided that they need to be "put out of their misery"--that's one of those things. If you're right, well and good. But if you're wrong, you cannot escape moral responsibility for your act--and saying that you "accept responsibility for it" is not good enough.
And, sorry, but I'm left gasping at the breath-taking moral arrogance that assumes that, even if we were killing only the guilty, or sincerely believed that we were, killing a mentally ill person whom we had previously not provided proper care because, without proper care, their illness played itself out in a truly horrific way, is adequately and appropriately described as "putting them out of their misery" and morally as acceptable as doing the same to a severely injured or incurably ill dog or cat.
I wonder what part it is of being so ill that one can't help but kill people in horrible ways that you think of as not miserable.
It's not that they're not miserable, Carrie; it's that they're not dogs or cats. I'm truly saddened that that point wasn't obvious to you.
As I believe I've said a number of times already, if there's a better alternative I am more than happy to support it; I just don't know of one and am therefore willing to accept the karma of having the state kill such unfortunates on my behalf.
Carrie, at least one question left hanging by that is, are you willing to also accept the karma of having the state kill innocents in your name, in order to be sure the Mansons are killed? Because we do not have a system that executes only the guilty, we know we do not have a system that executes only the guilty, and we cannot escape moral responsibility for the consequences of that.
And, sorry, but I'm left gasping at the breath-taking moral arrogance that assumes that, even if we were killing only the guilty, or sincerely believed that we were, killing a mentally ill person whom we had previously not provided proper care because, without proper care, their illness played itself out in a truly horrific way, is adequately and appropriately described as "putting them out of their misery" and morally as acceptable as doing the same to a severely injured or incurably ill dog or cat.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2006 | 17 |
| 2005 | 23 |
| 2004 | 24 |
| 2003 | 21 |
Total: 86 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lis Carey:
Show all comments by Lis Carey.