State Layoffs Are Coming As Deadlines Loom

It is the last day of June, which means it is time for another round of government layoffs. Some state governments will be shutting down tonight, sending most workers home, because they haven’t put together a budget. Others will be preparing for layoffs because they do have a new budget, but one that is smaller than last year’s. Layoffs and reduced hours also affect businesses that depend on state funding or that provide supplies and services to state operations. Schools and local governments may follow with layoffs if the details of the state budget are disappointing.

California, at least, will not be one of the states without a budget this year. The budget agreement announced yesterday may be ugly and socially unacceptable, but it is better than having a more rationally constructed budget that arrives in September. California’s new budget makes lofty economic assumptions that may have to be revisited as soon as then, probably resulting in layoffs at schools. In the meantime, the big bite in the California budget compromise is $2 billion taken away from redevelopment efforts. At least 25,000 job cuts will have to follow across the state starting next week after that particular budget cut.

It may be a similar story in Pennsylvania, which looks to have a new budget nearly on time, but with more than $2 billion in education cuts. Schools across the state will be shedding 20,000 jobs — and 100,000 students.

These kind of budget cuts may appear short-sighted, and the job cuts that result from state budget cuts will likely be enough to bump up the unemployment rate and stall the national economy, but it is easy to underestimate the value of having a budget in place. When people are waiting for the budget, they’re not working productively, and the ultimate economic costs of the worry, uncertainty, and distraction are just as real as those of unemployment.

Big Tobacco Sues to Keep Cigarette Logos

Australia is planning a step forward in cigarette packaging next year, replacing the current commercial packages with grisly packaging that’s designed to be as ugly as possible while still showing accurately the medical consequences of cigarette smoking. The new cigarette packs will still show the brand of cigarette, but only in two lines of plain text. The legislation has barely been introduced, and Phillip Morris is already suing, claiming it has a legal right to use its logos on cigarette packs.

It’s a high-risk move for Big Tobacco, which has never been able to win similar suits in the more commerce-friendly legal systems of Canada and the United States, but observers say it’s part of a new global campaign of predatory litigation. A similar lawsuit is underway in Uruguay, of all places. Uruguay is a small country that has just a few thousand cigarette smokers, but it has tightened its cigarette labeling laws and the tobacco lawyers may see it as a relatively easy mark.

The tobacco industry will lose all these suits, but it stands to lose more than that. By presenting itself so visibly in such a predatory fashion, Big Tobacco undercuts its own public and political support. A legislator cannot easily vote to protect the interests of a predatory foreign industry. The latest legislative battle for tobacco would ban cigarette smoking in cars where there are children. The world is just now coming around to recognize that children in cars with cigarette smoke sometimes suffer heart attacks and other diseases as a consequence, and if the issue is seen in those terms, moves to protect children from those dangers may be put in place rather quickly.

I have my doubts about the Halloween horror-show themes of cigarette labeling in Canada and coming soon to the United States and Australia. I would rather see cigarette packages that look weak and pathetic, modeled perhaps after the bureaucratic style of a high school hall pass. Horror reinforces addictive behavior, so that theme won’t help people break their addictions. But it will undercut the public standing of cigarettes and will probably dissuade new users, along with some retailers. The new packages are too ugly to be seen in polite company, or in the presence of children. Getting cigarettes out of sight is, at least, a step in the right direction.

China’s Real Estate Development Bubble

Auditors in China yesterday reported that local governments there owe $1.6 trillion. We don’t really know what the focal point of all that debt is, but a large part of it must be speculation in real estate development. That’s the same problem that is causing so many bank failures and bailouts in the United States and Europe. Bailouts may be called for too in China, to prevent the banks from failing, and it could end up with many of the same economic consequences we are seeing in countries like the United States and Ireland.

Books as Spam

Book publishing is being overrun by spam.

The definitive news story on this topic this month is the Reuters story, “Spam clogging Amazon's Kindle self-publishing,” written by Alistair Barr. Though this story focuses on the flaws in Amazon’s ebook platform, the spam book phenomenon is by no means limited to ebooks or to Amazon. Ars Technica looked at some of the broader implications of the Reuters story, with screen pictures so you don’t have to imagine what Amazon is turning into.

Alas, this is a problem that has been creeping up on us for ages. “Never judge a book by its cover” is a folk saying addressing this topic that goes back long before I was born. The phenomenon of books as deceptive advertising hit its stride in the 1960s. I remember reading a thick paperback book published, I think, in 1963, when it sold for the then hefty price of 75¢. It was supposedly a book about healthy living, and it sported some real information about food and weight-bearing exercise, but taken as a whole, it was an advertisement for the putative author’s line of “health food” chocolate bars.

In the 1960s, this kind of book was slightly disreputable, but readers and book publishers put up with it because there weren’t so many people who had the writing skill to write a book at all. Flash forward to the recession of 2001-2002, and it became mandatory for a book author to have a “platform” — an ongoing business that could profit from the publicity surrounding the book, because the author certainly wasn’t going to make any money from the book itself. Book advances from major publishers had declined by then from the $3,000 that was common in the 1960s, theoretically enough for the author to live on while writing the book, to $500, not nearly enough to cover the author’s travel expenses while promoting the book. Most books don’t sell enough to earn royalty payments, and most authors know this, so if an author is going to spend her own money to promote a book, she has to have a business plan to profit from the publicity. Publishers insist on this now because they know from experience that authors who don’t have a platform tend not to do much to promote their books, and there is little that publishers can do without the authors. But the result of all this is that most books from well-known publishers are written with the promotional opportunity in mind. They are very carefully disguised advertisements. These books put the valuable content first to reward the reader, but the upsell is never far away.

In this context, it shouldn’t be shocking if most of the 99¢ ebooks — indeed, many of the $97 ebooks too — follow this same model, but are not so carefully done. Just as email spammers think nothing of sending 100 email messages to 10 million recipients each just to see which marketing message works, ebook spammers will create a disposable author identity and create 10 to 20 ebooks credited to that pen name in an afternoon just to see if any sales result. Amazon has been hit hardest with spam books, according to the Reuters story,

clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc’s publishing foray.

But the whole book business is suffering from the same effect. Book prices haven’t gone up in the last 11 years (with some exceptions, such as textbooks) mainly because readers are resisting higher prices. And why is that? Readers don’t like the feeling of paying $29.95 for a book only to discover that it contains only a single chapter of valuable information, a pattern that unfortunately describes most of the “platform” books published in recent years. This inability to raise prices is arguably the main reason why Borders and about half of independent bookstores have failed in the last decade.

Low-quality books are not just spam. Some are outright fakes. The Ars Technica story describes ebooks of content stolen from legitimate sources, purchased from content mills for as little as $7, even copied and pasted hundreds of times to pad the page count. Some books are falsely attributed to famous authors to try to draw more attention. Of course, these too are sloppier versions of tricks that major publishers have employed for decades. How many people have picked up a book with a famous name at the top of the front cover, failing to notice the words “with a foreword by” preceding the name? Or a 300-page book that turned out to consist mostly of appendixes?

Printed books will not hold up much better than ebooks, simply because any ebook can be printed and bound with minimal effort. If the idea of books as spam is so disconcerting, it is because we are used to the book industry providing a base level of quality for books. That is breaking down in multiple ways and we have to do our own checking. In the long run, we will need a social network to vouch for the legitimacy of any purchased content, including books.

Time Pressure and Obesity

Time pressure is probably contributing significantly to obesity. Long-term trends show time pressure and obesity both climbing year after year, and though that doesn’t prove anything, it does suggest that time pressure and obesity could go together.

Anecdotally, obesity and time pressure are connected. “Just grab anything” and “There’s no time to exercise” are more common than “Did you notice we forgot to eat supper?” Weight loss coaches stress the importance of following a system and making the right decisions about food — just the kind of thinking that disappears under time pressure. The key to success in an exercise program is not what exercises you do, but just putting in the time. Part of the success of the food journal process is having people discover how much they eat while they’re busy and not fully paying attention. All these factors and others suggest that there are people who don’t always have time to maintain a healthy weight. A serious scientific look at weight gain, The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity: How the Modern World Is Making Us Fat (2007), lists time pressure as one of seven social and economic factors that create the obesity trend.

If that’s the case, though, the continuing time pressure trend may make it hard to turn around the obesity trend. Is there a way around this connection, so that we can lose weight even when we’re frightfully busy — or will we have to get a handle on time pressure before we can turn the tide on obesity?