1. Proprietary technology. This one is straightforward. If you invent the best technology, and then you patent it, nobody else can compete with you. Thiel provocatively says that your technology must be 10x better than anyone else’s to have a chance of working. If you’re only twice as good, you’re still competing. You may have a slight competitive advantage, but you’re still competing and your life will be nasty and brutish and so on just like every other company’s. Nobody has any memory of whether Lycos’ search engine was a little better than AltaVista’s or vice versa; everybody remembers that Google’s search engine was orders of magnitude above either. Lycos and AltaVista competed; Google took over the space and became a monopoly.
2. Network effects. Immortalized by Facebook. It doesn’t matter if someone invents a social network with more features than Facebook. Facebook will be better than their just by having all your friends on it. Network effects are hard because no business will have them when it first starts. Thiel answers that businesses should aim to be monopolies from the very beginning – they should start by monopolizing a tiny market, then moving up. Facebook started by monopolizing the pool of Harvard students. Then it scaled up to the pool of all college students. Now it’s scaled up to the whole world, and everyone suspects Zuckerberg has somebody working on ansible technology so he can monopolize the Virgo Supercluster. Similarly, Amazon started out as a bookstore, gained a near-monopoly on books, and used all of the money and infrastructure and distribution it won from that effort to feed its effort to monopolize everything else. Thiel describes how his own company PayPal identified eBay power sellers as its first market, became indispensible in that tiny pool, and spread from there.
3. Economies of scale. Also pretty straightforward, and especially obvious for software companies. Since the marginal cost of a unit of software is near-zero, your cost per unit is the cost of building the software divided by the number of customers. If you have twice as many customers as your nearest competitor, you can charge half as much money (or make twice as much profit), and so keep gathering more customers in a virtuous cycle.
4. Branding. Apple is famous enough that it can charge more for its phones than Amalgamated Cell Phones Inc, even for comparable products. Partly this is because non-experts don’t know how to compare cell phones, and might not trust Consumer Reports style evaluations; Apple’s reputation is an unfakeable sign that their products are pretty good. And partly it’s just people paying extra for the right to say “I have an iPhone, so I’m cooler than you”. Another company that wants Apple’s reputation would need years of successful advertising and immense good luck, so Apple’s brand separates it from the competition and from the economic state of nature.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.
March 3, 2019
QotD: Four ways to corporate monopoly
March 2, 2019
Mark Steyn – Trudeaupia on the Waterfront
Mark Steyn on the “nothing to see here, let’s just move on” SNC-Lavalin affair:
Speaking as someone who gets sued a lot, I account Jody Wilson-Raybould as a killer exemplar of what every litigant dreads the other side coming up with – a credible witness. In a riveting performance, the former Attorney General of Canada laid out calmly and without overheated rhetorical flourish a campaign by the most powerful figures in the government to get their cronies at SNC-Lavalin off the hook of a criminal prosecution for bribing (Libyan) government officials. Ms Wilson-Raybould identified just shy of a dozen Liberal Party bruisers who leaned on her, including the most senior chaps in the Prime Minister’s Office, the Privy Council Office and the Ministry of Finance – and ultimately the PM himself.
But, in a competitive field, perhaps the behavior of Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, a career civil servant and the highest-ranking in Canada, is the most outrageous. In a three-man meeting – the Clerk, the Attorney General and the PM – Mr Wernick acted not as an impartial public servant but as a gung-ho party hack demanding political interference in a criminal prosecution in order to help Justin’s pals beat the rap:
The PM again cited potential loss of jobs and SNC moving. Then to my surprise – the Clerk started to make the case for the need to have a DPA – he said “there is a board meeting on Thursday (Sept 20) with stock holders” … “they will likely be moving to London if this happens”… “and there is an election in Quebec soon”…
At that point the PM jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that “and I am an MP in Quebec – the member for Papineau”.
I was quite taken aback. My response – and I remember this vividly – was to ask the PM a direct question while looking him in the eye – I asked: “Are you politically interfering with my role / my decision as the AG? I would strongly advise against it.” The Prime Minister said “No, No, No – we just need to find a solution.”
When Ms Wilson-Raybould held firm against Justin’s pressure to lean on the Crown’s prosecution of a serious criminal case, he arranged a Cabinet reshuffle to remove her as Attorney General.
This is a protection racket: Underneath the LGBTQWERTY Ramadan socks and the Bollywood bridesmaid outfits for his passage through India, Justin Trudeau turns out to be Lee J Cobb in On the Waterfront. My old friend Paul Wells calls this a “moral catastrophe” for Justin. Not quite: He is who he is. It’s a moral catastrophe for Canada if those who dote on the Dauphin make the rest of us go along with it.
February 27, 2019
Toronto’s transit cheat epidemic
I knew the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) had an issue with fare evasion, but I had no idea it was as prevalent as this:
Anyone who has ever sat through a Toronto Transportation Commission meeting has likely heard anecdotal evidence that fare evasion on the transit system is utterly rampant, if not a mockery of Western civilization itself. Traditionally, such people tended to be treated as harmless cranks. TTC staff would placate them with various internal audits conducted over the years that found roughly two-per-cent fare loss. As recently as 2017, the TTC was claiming just 1.8 per cent of passengers on streetcars — where it’s easiest not to pay — weren’t ponying up.
Well, so much for that. In a convincing report issued last week based on 136 hours of in-person observation and 38 hours of security footage, city auditor-general Beverly Romeo-Beehler estimates fare evasion rates at 15.2 per cent on streetcars, 5.1 per cent on buses and 3.7 per cent on subways, for a total weighted average of 5.4 per cent— around $61 million a year, plus roughly $3.4 million thanks to malfunctioning Presto card equipment owned by Metrolinx.
To put that in perspective, last year’s average 3.2-per-cent fare increase was projected to add $17 million to TTC coffers. If the AG is right, commuters are paying something like 12 cents per trip to subsidize free riders. And the problems underlying the issue are nothing short of jaw-dropping. For one thing, the auditor-general’s team observed scores of adults — and precisely zero children — using child Presto cards to ride for free.
QotD: When progressives took over SF publishing
When I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the “climate” but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and the hints and social positioning of “further left than thou.” For instance, my first SF cons, as an author, in the green room, I became aware that “a conservative” was a suitable, laughter inducing punchline for any joke; that all of them believed the Reagan years had set us on course to total dystopia; that the US was less enlightened/capable/free than anywhere else; that your average Republican or even non-Democrat voter was the equivalent of the Taliban.
As for Libertarians, I will to my dying day cherish the dinner I had with my then editor to whom I was describing a funny incident at MileHi where for reasons known only to Bob, I found myself in an argument with someone who wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. My editor perked up and (I swear I’m not making this up) said “Oh, a Libertarian.” At which point my husband squeezed my thigh hard enough to stop me answering. But yeah. That was a not uncommon idea of a libertarian. If it was completely insane and involved banning something, then it was a libertarian.
I once overheard the same editor talking to a colleague and saying that if she got submissions across her desk and they were – dropped and horrified voice – somewhat conservative she recommended they try Baen.
Which the other editor (from a different house) agreed with, because after all, they weren’t in the business of publishing conservative works.
This immediately put me on notice that in the field if you were a conservative (I presume libertarians were worse, or at least they seemed to induce more mouth foaming. And though I was solidly libertarian and – at the time – might have qualified as a Libertarian, I suspect if faced with my real positions they would have classed me as conservative, because my positions were self-obviously not left and that’s all it took.) there was only one house that would take you, and if what you wrote/wanted to write wasn’t accepted by then, then you were out of luck.
After that I lived in a state of fear
I imagine it was similar to living in one of the more unsavory periods of the Soviet Union. You saw these purges happen. Whisper-purges. You got the word that someone was “not quite the thing” or that they associated with so and so who associated with so and so who was a – dropped voice – conservative. Suddenly that person’s books weren’t being bought and somehow people would clear a circle around them, because, well, you know, if you’re seen with a – dropped voice – conservative they might think you’re one too. And then it’s off to Never-Never with you.
I found a few other conservatives/libertarians (frankly, mostly libertarians) in the field, all living in the same state of gut clenching fear.
We did such a dance to test both the reliability and discretion of the other before revealing ourselves that we might as well have developed a hanky code. [Blue for true blue Conservative, white for pure Libertarian, red for the blood of our heroes, brown for OWL (older, wiser libertarian), purple for squishy conservative, powder blue for Brad Torgersen. (The powder blue care bear, with the bleeding heart… and the flame thrower.)]
Conventions were nerve wracking because I watched myself ALL the TIME. And you never knew how much you had to watch yourself. Suddenly, out of the blue, at a World Fantasy the speaker, a well known SF/F writer went on about Dean Howard, our next president. The room erupted in applause, some people stood to clap, and I sat there, frozen, unable to actually fake it to that point but too shocked to even put a complaisant expression on my face.
Sarah Hoyt, “Say Goodbye To The State Of Fear”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-11.
February 26, 2019
Laissez-faire versus “Fairtrade”
In the Guardian, a sad tale of the fading bright hopes of the (relatively small number of) affluent westerners who passionately supported the “Fairtrade” movement:
When, in 2017, Sainsbury’s announced that it was planning to develop its own “fairly traded” mark, more than 100,000 people signed a petition condemning the move. Today, on the eve of Fairtrade Fortnight, the fact that most supermarkets have moved away from the standards developed by the Fairtrade Foundation is worrying.
While some grocery chains have sought the foundation’s stamp of approval, many have gone their own way. This means most consumers have little sense of which organisation is doing what to protect the wages and rights of developing world workers. Over the next two weeks, the foundation plans to focus its publicity efforts on cocoa farmers in west Africa and the way the Fairtrade mark can improve their lives.[…]
That is a sad situation. After the great financial crash of 2008, a commodity boom that lasted from 2013 to 2017 turned into a slump that has robbed farmers and developing world governments of vital cash. Just as they were managing to stabilise their finances and set aside money to invest, the world price tumbled and wiped out their profit. Fairtrade practices protect farmers from this sort of setback and allow them to plan for the future.
Of course they have their critics. These are most mostly from the US – people who favour unfettered markets and seek to undermine the Fairtrade ideal, saying it is a form of protectionism that dampens innovation and ultimately ruins farms.
Theirs is an almost religious adherence to the free market that discounts the gains in stability and security that Fairtrade provides, and the scope of the community premium to promote universal education and the rights of women.
But without large employers making strides to adopt the standardised and transparent Fairtrade practices put forward by the foundation, it will be left to consumers to drive the project forward.
At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall responds:
The Guardian tells us that the Great White Hope of global trade, Fairtrade, isn’t in fact working. On the basis that no one seems to be doing very much of it. To which the answer is great – for the only fair trade is laissez faire.
This does not mean that Fairtrade should not have been tried – to insist upon that would be to breach our basic insistence upon the value of peeps just getting on with doing what they want, laissez faire itself. But the very value of that last is that we go try things out, see whether they work and if they don’t we stop doing them. If they do then great, we do more of them.
[…]
So, trying out Fairtrade, why not? Let’s go see how many other people feel the same way? In exactly the same way we find out whether people like Pet Rocks, skunk or Simon Cowell. Product gets put on the market we see whether it adds to human welfare or not. If people value it – and revealed preferences please, by actually buying it – at more than the use of those scarce resources in other uses then that’s adding to human welfare and long may it thrive. If it doesn’t, if it’s subtracting value from the human experience, then we’ll stop doing it as those trying go bust.
This is not an aberration of the system it is the system and it’s why laissez faire works. Peeps get to do whatever and we keep doing more of what works, less of what doesn’t.
Fairtrade? No, I never thought it was going to work as anything other than virtue signalling for Tarquin and Jocasta but that’s fine. Why shouldn’t Tarquin and Jocasta gain their jollies by virtue signalling? As it turns out, now that we’ve tried it, no one else gives a faeces*. So, we can stop. Except, obviously enough, for those specialist outlets like the Co Op where the odd can still gain their jollies. It being that very mark of a laissez faire, liberal, society that the jollies of the odd are still catered to in due proportion to the desire for them.
*From Gibbon, all the fun stuff’s in Latin.
“The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy”
Conrad Black on the ongoing SNC-Lavalin scandal:
The SNC-Lavalin affair is the quintessential Canadian controversy. It is alleged by unnamed sources that the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, was pressured to order her officials to assess fines rather than prosecute executives for financial crimes in the matter of SNC-Lavalin’s methods in seeking certain construction contracts in Libya, not a country where the Better Business Bureau rules commerce with an iron fist. At a later date, Ms. Wilson-Raybould consented to be moved to the position of associate minister of national defence and minister of veterans’ affairs, generally considered a demotion. When rumours circulated in the media about the propriety of allowing the company to pay fines rather than prosecute some of its executives, the prime minister defended the government, denied the rumours, and stated that the minister’s continued presence in the government was proof that the rumours were unfounded. The minister then resigned, but has since attended a full caucus meeting and had a calming effect on the Liberal MPs. She has said nothing publicly because of the delicacy of lawyer/client privilege opposite the prime minister, who has declined to waive the privilege. This is, in fact, bunk. The prime minister was not the client of the minister of justice in the SNC-Lavalin affair, and the prime minister doesn’t have any standing to waive anything on this subject, and his invocation of cabinet secrecy is twaddle, especially after the subject was aired before the entire Liberal caucus.
All government spokespeople deny any official misconduct or impropriety but the principal secretary and chief strategist of the regime, Gerald Butts, resigned, with the novel explanation that although nothing inappropriate had occurred, he thought the air should be cleared, so he walked the plank. This is the point at which this supposed scandal becomes uniquely Canadian. A minister belatedly resigns but informally continues to attend cabinet and expatiate on this issue and the government reinforces its protestations of absolute innocence of wrongdoing by the prime minister accepting the abrupt resignation of the most influential non-elected person in the government (and he also had a great deal more influence than almost all the elected ministers and MP’s).
I invite any reader to cite another country where a minister would consent to be shuffled down, maintain a complete silence while her father, an indigenous leader, has conducted an entertaining non-stop press conference denouncing the “white man’s justice,” although he has clearly gamed the system pretty well for himself, and the head of the prime minister’s office and closest collaborator of the prime minister resigns while proclaiming that nothing improper has been done and that he is only sacrificing himself to satiate the false accusers. This is too innocuous for the Americans and major European countries, too wholesome for Latin America, too complicated for the Swiss and Scandinavians, too discrete for Australia, and small potatoes for the Japanese. This is Canada, the land of Dudley Do-Right, and before him, of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald singing Rose-Marie in the Rockies. The story line of this scandal is absurd, but in its way, magnificently Canadian.
February 23, 2019
QotD: “Toxic masculinity”
And then we have toxic masculinity. Is there toxic masculinity? Of course there is. Well, there is toxic and it can have a masculine expression. Because of obvious biological differences, the most toxic of women will have issues beating up people or raping them. It can be done, but it won’t be common.
Is masculinity toxic? Not more than femininity. The latest insistence on doing everything the feminine way has got us “feminine business” and “feminine politics” where everything is run on image, innuendo and gossip: the female version of toxicity. You’re either with the group or out, and if you’re out we’ll demonize you.
So blaming everything on men is bad-crazy.
I have a friend who has been trying to defend the Gillette ad as in “But they’re giving to causes that help raise boys who are fatherless” etc. I love her to death, but no. While that might be laudable, the fact is that that add is another brick in the wall of “If you’re a woman and your life isn’t perfect it’s a man’s fault.”
This bad crazy not only destroys marriages, it destroys GIRLS. You see that thing above “to succeed you must sacrifice?” If you infect females with the idea that they’re owed success and if they don’t get it, it’s men’s fault, you’re both undermining them and turning them into rage-filled screeching monkeys, who are exactly zero use to society. (Oh, but they vote for Marxists, so I guess there’s that.)
Worse, this bad crazy is riding on other bad crazy. Which like most bad crazy since the twentieth century has its origins on the insane crazy of Marx.
The question is, WHY was this ad made at all? It certainly doesn’t sell razors. So, why?
Because for decades we’ve taught our children their most important role in life is the crazy cakes “change the world” or “make a difference” and the difference they’re supposed to make is in the class-war (or race war, or sex war now) sense of bringing about the Marxist paradise. We tell them they’re supposed to speak for the voiceless, then tell them the voiceless are the “designated victim classes” (whom frankly we can’t get to SHUT UP.) We tell them this is what gives meaning to life. We tell them through school, through entertainment, through news narratives, through the people who are being lionized.
And this is bad crazy. Really bad crazy. By itself it is a wrench that will take society apart. We have publishers, writers, journalists, and probably taxi drivers, policemen, engineers and who knows what, increasingly convinced their highest calling is not doing their job, but “educating” or “improving” or “raising the consciousness of” other people.
Even for a credo that worked with humanity — say Christianity — when a society becomes convinced pushing the idea is more important than doing their job, the wheels come off. BUT when the credo is neo-Marxism, or actually “increasingly elaborate excuses as for the only thing Marxism brings about is death” it’s exponentially worse.
It’s also the explanation for why the wheels come off every field that gets taken over by the left: because the people in those fields stop understanding what their actual job is.
And it’s everywhere. At such a deep level that most people — even those mad at Gillette — didn’t see that the actual problem is that no one involved in the damn ad understood it had NOTHING to do with SELLING the product.
It’s bad crazy. There’s a lot of bad crazy running in the world. And we must stop it — and build under, build over, build around — or it will kill society.
Sarah Hoyt, “Bad Crazy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-01-20.
February 21, 2019
QotD: Nuisance shareholders
Stock ownership has become politicized. Many shareholders own stock in publicly-owned corporations for the sole purpose of advancing the shareholders’ own social or political agendas, while simultaneously assailing the corporations’ legitimate business operations. These activist shareholders are “nuisance shareholders.”
A primary tool of nuisance shareholders is the submission of non-binding precatory (advisory) proposals for discussion and vote at annual meetings of shareholders. Proposals from nuisance shareholders can coerce management into making decisions not in the best interests of the Company and its bona fide shareholders, and turn the annual meeting into a media-activist circus.
Steve Milloy, “I fought ExxonMobil management on climate — and I won”, JunkScience.com, 2017-03-13.
February 20, 2019
February 16, 2019
The state of play in the SNC-Lavalin affair
If you happen to have misplaced your Libranos scorecard, Daniel Bordman has a quick summary to bring you up to date:
So here is how the accusation stands: The PMO put pressure on the AG to the benefit of SNC-Lavalin, she refused and was shuffled out of the AG position.
This led to a massive public outcry from the Conservatives, NDP and the 10 or so Journalists left in the mainstream media. The original plan was for the new AG, David Lametti, to explain to the public why this story is overblown and there was no need to look any further into the allegations.
His plan: he went on TV and explained to the public that he had spoken to Justin Trudeau and he had denied the allegations, so no investigation was needed. Brilliant! If only Bruce MacArthur and Alexander Bissonnette had known of this expert legal strategy of denying what you were caught doing, they could have escaped justice.
It is also important to note that the Prime Minister admits to having “rigorous conversations” with Jody Wilson Raybould over the SNC-Lavalian case.
After the Shaggy “it wasn’t me” defence failed to convince anyone outside of the CBC editorial board of Justin Trudeau’s innocence, a new plan was formed.
Plan B seemed to be, have everyone smear Jody Wilson-Raybould and act like it was her scandal not the PMO’s.
While she was remaining silent due to attorney-client privilege (which is a debatable position), Trudeau continued to speak for her. Again, it should be pointed out that Trudeau could have waived this at anytime to let her tell her side of the story, he didn’t.
This all came to a head when Trudeau claimed that “her presence in the cabinet speaks for itself”. The next day she resigned.
Off to Plan C, which seems to have been concocted by new Liberal strategist, Kim Jong Un.
A committee will be constructed to investigate these accusations, which of course will have a majority of Liberals and be headed by Liberal MP, Anthony Housefather, who has already added his flare to the investigation suggesting the reason that Jody Wilson Raybould was shuffled out of the AG position was because she didn’t speak French.
Remember, he is the impartial leader of Liberals investigating an allegation of Liberal corruption. It is also important to point out that both of the ministers in charge of immigration matters, Ahmed Hussain and Bill Blair, can’t speak a word of French between them.
Indian government considers hiking the national minimum wage
Tim Worstall explains why this is a bad idea that won’t do much — if anything — to improve the lot of workers already earning the current minimum wage, and might well make things worse:
It’s not surprising that this is happening, India mooting a rise in the national minimum wage. There is, after all, an election in the offing. Just when we would expect crowd pleasing but bad ideas to surface. The problem here is that the Indian minimum wage is already too high. Increasing something that’s too high is not sensible policy. […]
Sure, we can declare a floor price and that will be valid wherever the government’s writ runs. Which, in the Indian economy, isn’t all that far.
The national minimum wage could be set at Rs 9,750 per month, almost double the current level, along with an additional Rs 55 per day of average HRA for urban workers, an expert committee has submitted. The January report, which went public for suggestions on Thursday, has also suggested an alternate plan, with a range of Rs 8,892-11,622 per month of national minimum wage for five different regions as they have diverse socio-economic and labour market situations, The Indian Express reported.
The specific details don’t matter all that much because the Indian government isn’t that powerful in economic matters.
The point being that any formal minimum wage will only apply to people in the formal economy. Depending upon who you want to believe between 80 and 90% of the Indian economy is over in the informal sector. That’s the part of the economy that doesn’t have health and safety standards, proper contracts and minimum wages. And our proof that the current minimum wage is too high is exactly that, that most of the economy isn’t in the formal sector where it applies.
In one manner raising that Indian minimum wage is an irrelevance because it affects so few people. In another it’s actively bad, as it makes it more expensive to join that formal economy, thus making it less likely. Thus it’s a bad idea either way. But you know, elections, politics.
January 31, 2019
Coming soon for Canadians – mandatory maple-flavoured search results
Michael Geist relates the ongoing efforts of ACTRA to get the federal government to mandate high visibility for Canadian content in search engines:
The escalating battle being waged for new Internet taxes to fund Canadian content does not stop with proposals for new fees on Internet access and online video services. Cultural groups also want to increase the “discoverability” of Canadian content by mandating its inclusion in search results. According to the ACTRA submission to the broadcast and telecom legislative review panel, it has been calling for search engine regulation for the past 20 years:
ACTRA stated during the 1999 CRTC process that Internet search engines would become the gateway for consumers to access the vast array of entertainment and information now available from around the world. We argued then the CRTC should regulate them.
It now argues for mandated inclusion of Canadian content in search results for cultural content under threat of economic sanction:
Regulating search engines would be difficult, but ACTRA recommends the government approach search engines like Google, Bing and others, and request they ensure Canadians are offered some Canadian choices in their search results. While it is neither possible nor appropriate to interfere in the final selection made by individuals, Canadian consumers should have a real choice, including Canadian films, television programs and music. We expect companies would concur with the government’s reasonable request to be seen as good corporate citizens. If a particular search engine does not agree to this request, the government should impose an appropriate regulatory constraint or burden, such as amending the Income Tax Act to discourage Canadians from advertising on search engines that fail to comply.
January 27, 2019
Some reasons to be bearish on Tesla’s future
At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer climbs back onto one of his favourite hobby horses:
Yes, I am like an addict on Tesla but I find the company absolutely fascinating. Books and HBS case studies will be written on this saga some day (a couple are being written right now but seem to be headed for Musk hagiography rather than a real accounting ala business classics like Barbarians at the Gate or Bad Blood).
I still stand by my past thoughts here, where I predicted in advance of results that 3Q2018 was probably going to be Tesla’s high water mark, and explained the reasons why. I won’t go into them all. There are more than one. But I do want to give an update on one of them, which is the growth and investment story.
First, I want to explain that I have nothing against electric vehicles. I actually have solar panels on my roof and a deposit down on an EV, though it is months away from being available. What Tesla bulls don’t really understand about the short position on Tesla is that most of us don’t hate on the concept — I respect them for really bootstrapping the mass EV market into existence. If they were valued in the market at five or even ten billion dollars, you would not hear a peep out of me. But they are valued (depending on the day, it is a volatile stock) between $55 to $65 billion.
The difference in valuation is entirely due to the charisma and relentless promotion by the 21st century’s PT Barnum — Elon Musk. I used to get super excited by Musk as well, until two things happened. One, he committed what I consider outright fraud in bailing out friends and family by getting Tesla to buy out SolarCity when SolarCity was days or weeks from falling apart. And two, he started talking about things I know about and I realized he was totally full of sh*t. That is a common reaction from people I read about Musk — “I found him totally spellbinding until he was discussing something I am an expert in, and I then realized he was a fraud.”
Elon Musk spins great technology visions. Like Popular Mechanics magazine covers from the sixties and seventies (e.g. a flying RV! a mile long blimp will change logging!) he spins exciting visions that geeky males in particular resonate with. Long time readers will know I identify as one of this tribe — my most lamented two lost products in the marketplace are Omni Magazine and the Firefly TV series. So I see his appeal, but I have also seen his BS — something I think a lot more people have caught on to after his embarrassing Boring Company tunnel reveal.
Modern advertising – “wokeness … for millennials, is basically Corinthian leather for the soul”
I’m still not caught up on all my RSS feeds, so this Jonathan Kay piece at Quillette is more than a week old, which is why we’re selling it at half-price:
… Coca-Cola doesn’t make you smile. The “Rich Corinthian Leather” that Chrysler used to upholster car seats wasn’t actually from Corinth. And smoking Virginia Slims doesn’t actually mean “You’ve come a long way, baby.” It probably just means you’re going to die of lung cancer.
But misleading as that Personna ad may have been, it had more substance than most modern commercials. At the very least, it purported to extol the actual physical quality of the product being advertised — even if the evidence presented in support of that claim was thin. Coke, Chrysler and Virginia Slims (a 1960s-era spinoff of Benson & Hedges), on the other hand, were selling fairy tales based on happiness, wealth and liberation, respectively.
A close Mad Men-era analogue to Gillette’s new ad would be this Virginia Slims ad from 1967. It starts with a woman in 19th-century clothing, staring mournfully at her feet while a sad tune plays. “It used to be, baby, you had no rights,” intones a male voice saucily. “No right to vote. No right to property. No right to the wage you earned. That was back when you were laced in, hemmed in, and left with not a whole lot to do. That was back when you had to sneak up to the attic if you wanted a cigarette. Smoke in front of a man? Heaven forbid!”
[…]
In some respects, the act of watching that ad is a voyage to a distant land: It’s not just that cigarette ads have been illegal in western countries for decades (the woman actually takes a puff — right there on TV). But the very idea that “women” smoke with a small “feminine hand” also would constitute its own sort of transphobic thoughtcrime. Nevertheless, the basic Madison Avenue impulse behind the ad is recognizable to modern eyes: There’s this cool social trend out there. Let’s present our product as part of that cool trend. In the 1960s, the cool trend was empowering women. A half century later, it’s hectoring men. In the 1960s, being progressive meant expanding the range of permissible behaviour. A half century later, it’s about imposing constraints. In the 1960’s, the puritans were the bad guys. Today, they’re the ones setting the moral agenda.
As a bonus, he also walks you through a Marketing 101 course (at least, the few things you’d remember after taking a Marketing 101 course) in his local store:
At my local Toronto pharmacy, a pack of eight Gillette “Fusion5™ ProShield™” razors goes for $42.14 (all figures in U.S. dollars) — a staggering $5.27 per razor. These are displayed, of course, at eye level, since they provide the highest profit margin. Stoop down to waist level, and you will find a package of three quad-bladed cartridges—in generic packaging, though they provide more or less the same quality shave as the Fusion5 — for just $2.26 per razor. And if you’re willing to go down to ankle level, you can get a 10-pack of “Life” brand twin blades for just 60 cents each. (They’re marked “disposable,” but I often will use the same one for several weeks.) Do the math here, and you’ll see that we are talking about an almost 10-fold difference in price for products that — notwithstanding the many protestations I’m set to receive from hipsters who shave with hand-forged titanium blades stored in sealed alabaster canisters full of ionized gas — do the same basic thing.
This is true for a lot of product categories where there are no real differences between competing products except what the geniuses in the respective corporate marketing departments can conjure up out of their collective vivid imaginations.
January 24, 2019
In Canada, “total revenue per GB is roughly 70 times higher than in India and 23 times higher than in Finland”
Canadians are used to being screwed by our telecommunications companies, but it’s worse than I thought, as Michael Geist illustrates:
Tefficient, a European-based consultancy on the wireless market, released its latest report this morning comparing pricing and usage in the global wireless market. The data, which incorporates the most recent CRTC numbers on the Canadian market, shows Canada as a global outlier when it comes to the revenues generated by wireless carriers. The report notes the unsurprising correlation between high prices and low data usage:
There is a prerequisite for continued data usage growth, though: The total revenue per gigabyte can’t be too high – like in Canada and Belgium. The total revenue per gigabyte here is roughly 70 times higher than in India and 23 times higher than in Finland. And consequently, mobile usage is lower than average.
The charts show where Canada stands relative to other countries with carriers generating more revenue per GB than anywhere else in the world and consequently Canada lagging behind many other countries in wireless usage.
Source: https://tefficient.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/tefficient-industry-analysis-3-2018-mobile-data-usage-and-revenue-1H-2018-per-country-final-17-Jan-2019.pdf
