blog_ El Blog de Fran Ontanaya

We are still deciding on some details, but you can use this document as template for your short story submissions (or just to write your fiction). As you’ll see, it’s a fairly simple template; more often than not our problem with submissions is that authors tried to do something fancy with their formatting, when that’s absolutely not needed. I’ve included an example of formatting for quoted style and dashed style dialogues —just use the one more common in your language.

Commented here: Unfortunately prices aren’t adjusted to costs unless there’s proper competition. If rivals can’t make the upfront investment for all the needed robotics, the automated industries will just keep prices at their optimal maximum and rack in the profits. It’s not a coincidence corporations have more cash than ever right now.

From Jim Watchman comment in this Marketwatch’s story: This plus they had to prove in court that there was no distinguishable difference from their products to Samsungs products during the lawsuit.…that hurt. Consumers now know by Apples testimony there is no advantage in paying 4x more for their product. Pure genius if true.

Another TED Conversations reply: Oh, I’m not arguing that there’s a large number (albeit MBTI surveys put the number of introverts at a few points over 50%), but that for the achievers that are, their introversion is portraited positively after it led them to success in tasks that require a lot of reflection. My question is if that quality (or at least, the possibility of having a kind of introversion that leads to achievements) is recognized and valued in people, at least in an equal level with extroversion, when they are still everywomen and everymen. Gates’ success was established early [...]

En retrospectiva creo que habría preferido plantearlo de otro modo; he aquí el debate: Introversion: is it regarded as normal in your country/culture? History offers a rather positive view of introverts: the lone explorers, the poets, the genius scientists, the artists, the philosophers, are often portraited as powered by the particular qualities of introspection. But the day to day social reality within their local tribe may be rather different. Introverts may be admired from afar, but depending on the culture, not so much in their neighborhood. This is not a big deal except when new generations are raised with only [...]

My reply to this question. Honest question: When we replace more and more jobs with those of robots, what happens to all the people who are now unemployed? Do we just keep making more jobs for them? Theoretically menial jobs that currently are uneconomical and that are still hard to robotize will increase their relative value. Maybe nobody would give you more than 2 cents for giving a hug, but when machines make food ridiculously cheap, you probably will be able to buy a kilo of oranges for 2 cents. The problem is, current economic policies and financial interests don’t [...]

Estoy en conversaciones con Michael Iwoleit, coeditor del magacín alemán Nova y de la edición internacional online, InterNova, para entrar como coeditor en la próxima renovación de esta última. El plan es editar algo similar a http://wordswithoutborders.org/ pero específicamente sobre ciencia ficción. Nova va a pasar a ser publicación profesional y Michael tiene que echar una mano, así que InterNova se quedaba coja. Estaré a cargo de rastrear y seleccionar autores de relatos en español, portugués, y francés, posiblemente también ilustradores, y de confeccionar la versión EPUB de la revista. Todavía tenemos un archivo de material pendiente por leer, pero [...]