Algorithms Optimize While Trust Erodes

In effect this is a minor thing, but it tells a story.
We have three e-mail accounts with some entity that calls itself att.yahoo, meaning that, along the way, AT&T must have acquired some piece of Yahoo, or gone into one of those mysterious partnerships. Trying to keep current with these matters requires absurd levels of [...]

The Daily Isn’t

My theme is not the daily paper but it is the Detroit News and Free Press that occasioned the thought I want to record. Subscribers to one or both of these papers have been served up a pretty botched meal this past year. The paper is still being printed daily, but subscribers only get the [...]

Crude but Amazing

After my years in the Army, I got my first real civilian job with a engineering company, and my first activity had to do with getting gasoline out of natural gas. The very concept is a little startling, when you think about it. Natural gas is a—well, a gas. And gasoline is, well, a liquid. [...]

Beware of Certain, uh, Utilities

I wonder how the notion arose that children can only be taught something through massive distraction? I’ve just been exposed to fifteen minutes of a long-running and so-called educational program—as old, almost, as the Public Broadcasting System. The first logo shown is the still sedate, the second the new and vibrant logo of The Electric [...]

Bodies with Distributed Organs

One of the interesting developments in business is that companies can and routinely do farm out whole functionalities. If you are the Buyer and buy from the Seller, a third party will probably be involved in that transaction in some way. I bought some software I needed Saturday. In the process I managed to mangle [...]

Self-Publishing – Experiences and Observations

Why Do It?
I have published four science fiction novels, one story collection, and fourteen stories and novellas in the usual way. Publishers or magazines bought these works. I got advances and royalties for books, straight cash for stories. All this happened in the period 1974-1981.
I wrote a sci-fi trilogy, three mysteries, and two contemporary novels [...]

Sports, Business—In That Order

Briefly. In the Detroit News the Business Section (a single page plus two columns) is enfolded into the Sports Section of the paper so that it is difficult to find. One wonders if this explains why Motown has made such uplifting news of late. This arrangement strongly suggests that around here Business is something Sports [...]

Beware of Tumbleweeds

One aspect of modern industrial civilization is that we’ve still not gotten the message. And that message? That message is that if we want the pet, we must scoop the poop. I was reminded of this by two articles, just days apart, that my vigilant Scout of Modernity, my wife, clipped and passed to me, [...]

A Bestseller!

Having just introduced a new “page” or “tab” on LaMarotte (see Novels above), I thought I’d complete the picture. My novels had good sales—and hope will continue to do so after a long lapse of years. The most popular in the 1980s was called The Karma Affair. It enjoyed brisk sales not only in this [...]

Filling Station

I went to a filling station yesterday because the right front tire on my black Honda kept going flat fast enough so that I needed to pump it back up every third day or so. A long while back my neighbor, Ray, suggested this particular station. “Good people there. You can talk to them.” I’d [...]