What is the best case prediction for the future?

The majority of the people in the US are center-left libertarians, more or less in agreement with me on most major issues. The entire mass media and both major political Parties are significantly more rightwing than the US population.
The reason no major media caters to us, the majority, is that big corporate money (such as advertising and foundation charity) is not available for such catering. Leftwing views are often opposed to corporate interests, and lefties are more resistant to advertising - that's no way to get a job with a big corporation that makes its money servicing other big corporations.
That's why hacks like Chuck Todd ('bothsides do everything') or money-chasers like Chris Wallace ('factchecking is not my job') get paid big bucks, and take up all the room on your TV - they shill for corporate interests, and deliver the rightwing pitch that attracts the advertiser's desired audience reliably.
Example: the attention paid to the semi-mythical Obama/Trump voter - a comforting narrative that attracts buyers of Ford and Dodge pickup trucks, while distorting and obscuring the physical facts and other attributes of actual news about the 2016 election.
- - -

Realistic best case scenarios are inherently political - they involve assessing what is possible.

They - the corporate interests who bought the major book publishing businesses with the goal of improving their efficiency and fostering continual growth in their bottom line, who reacted to the tax law decisions of 1979 by destroying their backlists and shortening their marketing window for new titles, and so forth - often pruned first, as part of their business model: sales dropped afterwards.

Amazon's book sales were still increasing, last I could check.

Except for the books actively promoted and marketed that hit big right away, and the occasional bestseller that emerges from the niche markets they are willing to support (Harry Potter series, say).
And we are agreeing to ignore audiobooks.

Corporate marketing strategies call for elimination of product lines whose sales and profits are flat, in favor of those whose sales or profits (textbooks, say, with their easily gouged captive market) grow quarter by quarter. As sales of ordinary novels and so forth do not support and never have supported such growth, that product line will be dropped - and nobody can buy what isn't on the shelf or available in the backlist catalog.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The boogyman of all of your arguments is the corporation. Just about every business in the U.S. is organized as some form of incorporation including the mom and pop operators (just to limit personal liability).

Most jobs are therefore provided by businesses that are corporations. They can't all be the boogyman.

We know how businesses operate. Sure, it's a market economy and it's profit based. That doesn't mean only the most profitable item is sold. It generally means the least profitable item is always at risk of not being sold.

That doesn't mean that only textbooks are sold. That's ridiculous.

Most people don't have your political views. Saying otherwise doesn't change the facts. Most bomb throwing union political organizers may have your political orientation but that's about it.

Undue large corporate money to political campaigns along with uneducated, religious bigotry has moved the parties to the right, particularly in "flyover" country.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

? Same old question, with these guys:
Are they deliberately misrepresenting the post, or are they innocently unable to comprehend the post?
Are they lying, or are they stupid?

Which is how books come to not be sold, despite no shortage of readers.
In this case, they don't understand their market or their product - their methods and criteria and motives for evaluating "profit" do not work for book publishing. As UK Leguin put it, in better but less directly applicable words: their notion of what profiteth a man alienates them from their market.

Yes, they do - issue by issue. Generally between 60 and 75%, depending on the issue involved and the poll circumstances.
I do hold a couple of unpopular views, such as favoring more aggressive removal of tax exempt status from churches that engage in political campaigning for individual political candidates (Michelle Bachmann, for example). But in general - restoration of strongly progressive taxation, no corporate money in political campaigns, no anonymous money in politics, carefully audited and transparently managed voting setups and government contracting, shorter jail sentences, humane prisons, elimination of routine cash bail, less Federal "safety" regulation of individual behavior, elimination of corporate personhood with regard to Constitutional rights, more autonomy for teachers and less Federal imposition in community public schools - long list - I'm right in the center of the large majority of the US population.

Bomb throwing union political organizers? Must be the same alternative universe your notion of my political orientation lives in.

Of course. They are only the bad guys when they are, in fact, the bad guys - such as in their ignorant and careless demolition of the book publishing business, which some are trying to ascribe to a lack of book readers.

A self-fulfilling ascription, eventually - the more difficult it is to find and read a good book or locate a community of readers, the more difficult it is to learn and practice writing good books, the fewer will do it and the less accomplished or rewarded they will become.
But that brings up a puzzle: We know why they set up propaganda factories and money laundering setups like Regnery Press, but why did they buy into literature publishing? Obviously if they thought they could make big money by "growing the business" from one quarter to the next they were idiots, and they are supposed to be smart guys, but what other motive could they have had?

At any rate, that kind of corporate behavior has to be taken into account, in any realistic assessment of a best case scenario. It's not going to go away.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

some people honestly believe that you can't keep political discourse out of any topic. case in point:
"Realistic best case scenarios are inherently political - they involve assessing what is possible."

so whenever you have a topic you will then have statements that aren't supported by evidence being defended as legitimate because the poster believes it for [insert arbitrary reason], like stating "The majority of the people in the US are center-left libertarians, more or less in agreement with me on most major issues" sans links, references, methodology or validation.

anyway, back on topic: the best case scenario must take into account actions more than politics, IMHO. we, as a people, can lead our technology down weird and sometimes irrational roads, usually based upon our personal desires and dreams trumping logical needs.

 

That poster is claiming that acknowledging the central role of politics in a significantly political issue implies insisting on including politics in every issue. (Such as free will, say, or color theory).

Are they lying, or are they stupid?

That was in a reply to a post that asserted only a few people shared my political stances and opinions - a ridiculously false claim presented without the slightest evidence (no mystery: there isn't any).
In my replies, on the other hand, you were handed stuff like this:

So all you would need is 1) an accurate notion of my political stances on those matters, and 2) an accurate notion of the general public's political stances on those matters. Unfortunately - - - -
That poster is claiming that somebody's failure to include links to obvious and frequently verified facts is equivalent to the nonexistence of those facts. That poster also claims - again, without evidence or argument - that I rely on personal "belief" to support my claims.

That same poster has not supported any of their many attempts to slander and denigrate with evidence of their own. Case in point (actually in point, unlike the mistake above):

That post is an innuendo, a pretense of objection to something not present - the suggestion is that some post made the claim that politics must or should be considered above action in best case scenarios. That is a false claim (and an obviously confused one - for one thing, politics is often action, sometimes the only effective action) and naturally (being false) appears without evidence - but comically enough in the same post that objects to such lack of evidence from other people.

So: Are they lying, or are they stupid?
What they did is unload a bunch of schoolboy stereotypes in my general direction, which could mean either or both in an adult.
- - - -

Like building nukes in major earthquake and tsunami zones, consigning to a small number of genetically homogenous GMOs dominance over 80% of a continent's farmland on the basis of inhouse and proprietary partial safety testing, rapidly boosting the CO2 content of the air in pursuit of fossil fuel powered air conditioning etc; all politically involved and politically significant actions driven (at least partly) by desire for wealth and dreams of ease.

So "we" all agree that politics is very important in best case estimations - the poster simply doesn't know (or hasn't considered) what politics is and includes. OK. That's normal for that Tribe.
But: we also read the projected delusion that "we" are driven in these political matters by personal desires and dreams overriding logical needs - as if everyone's politics and logical needs were equivalently at odds. That's revelatory - if anyone doesn't already know.

That does explain the Tribe's membership's obsession (a clear plurality of their posting here) with the personal habits and circumstances of liberals and lefties, but not their inability to accurately describe or predict or guess them. One would think that someone asserting the universal and equivalent dependence of scientific assessments on political stances and their source in personal circumstances would be better at guessing those circumstances from the evidence of the political stances, or at least not comically lousy at it - but such is not the case, in point or any other way.

Meanwhile, the following is obviously a simple truth briefly coupled with a solid reference to argument in support:

To post a simple example: no best case scenario that posits the global population in general becoming actually and voluntarily vegetarian is realistic. Instead, a realistic best case would involve something like meat rationing and/or synthetic meat for all rather than the meat riots of history or the cannibalism of anthropology. That would require - depend upon - political action.