Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2012

The Apple cult as a modern religion

Filed under: Business, Media, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Do non-Apple fans sometimes think they’re talking to religious fanatics when they talk to Apple users? It’s a silly question, isn’t it? Of course they do, because Apple has become more and more a religious experience rather than a mere technology company:

[Kirsten Bell] wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that a stranger observing one of the launches could probably be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a religious revival meeting.

Bell now studies the culture of modern biomedical research, but is an expert on messianic religious movements in South Korea.

She said that an Apple product launch takes place in a building “littered with sacred symbols, especially the iconic Apple sign itself”.

Keynote speeches feature an Apple leader reawakened and renewing their faith in the core message and tenets of the brand/religion.

The tradition of not broadcasting launches in real time is akin to a religious event where it is forbidden to broadcast Sacred Ceremonies.

Instead scribes or its Tame Apple Press act like the writers of the gospels, “testifying to the wonders they behold” in a completely non objective way.

September 10, 2012

The non-romantic reality of a book tour

Filed under: Books, Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Poor Charles Stross has experienced one-too-many book tours. It’s so not conducive to anything like comfort or a normal life:

A book signing tour sounds romantic, but actually it’s not. It’s like one of those cheap package holidays in which you get to tour South America or Europe in seven days. Each day you have to get out of bed at dawn or earlier and head to the airport for another cavity search and economy-class ticket to a new city. When you arrive, a new guide meets you in, shovels you into their car, and then takes you on a whistle-stop tour of sights of the city. (On a tourist tour, it’s museums or monuments; on a signing tour, it’s bookstores, where you render the stock non-returnable by defacing it with your signature.) You might be allowed to dump your bag in a hotel room if timing permits. The hotel room will be luxurious and expensive and you will spend so little time awake in it that it seems like a cruel joke, because your time will be programmed so tightly you barely have a chance to eat. It is possible that you will be dragged in front of microphones or cameras to answer confused or confusing questions by journalists who haven’t read your book; then, each evening, you will show up at a bookstore where hopefully there will be an audience who will listen to you deliver a canned speech and/or reading and then buy books which you will then sign. And you will have to be nice to everybody, on pain of potentially not getting another tour (which might sound like a blessing in disguise until you work out what’s going to happen to your income thereafter). Finally, your head hits the pillow around 11pm — don’t forget to check in for tomorrow’s exciting anal probe and air-sickness theme-park ride! — for as much as five or six hours’ sleep.

But then, the nightmare thought: a book tour reality TV show…

August 21, 2012

The critical message of this election cycle

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

A. Barton Hinkle distills all the campaign wisdom down into one easy-to-understand message: The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win:

The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.

No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies.

Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.

The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.

Rinse, repeat.

July 28, 2012

Matt Gurney: The LCBO and the “social responsibility” joke

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Following-up yesterday’s post on the call to break up the LCBO’s monopoly, Matt Gurney points out that the “social responsibility” claim is a farce:

It’s impossible for the LCBO to really pretend that its primary goal is to prevent Ontarians from drinking when it advertises heavily in print and broadcast media and has periodic sales and events to introduce consumers to new products. You’d think that would be enough to kill the social responsibility argument, but apparently not.

But there are plenty of other things that do. If Ontario believed that it had a social responsibility to directly control the sale of potentially harmful and addictive substances, why are cigarettes sold in every convenience store, milk mart and gas station in the province? Cigarettes kill an estimated 13,000 Ontarians every year. It’s completely inexplicable that this deadly substance can be sold by non-government monopolies while less lethal substances are tightly controlled under the banner of social responsibility. If the only way to ensure that alcohol is consumed in a socially responsible way is to have the province control its sale, why doesn’t that apply to tobacco? What about the two products is different in such a way that makes one OK for convenience stores and one not? This is the unanswered question that drives a stake through the heart of the social responsibility argument. Either the booze controls aren’t about social responsibility or the province is massively dropping the ball on the smokes. Which one is it, guys?

And it’s not like Ontario is somehow blind to the problem of smoking. During the tenure of Premier Dalton McGuinty, the province has cracked down on smoking in any number of ways, including but not limited to outlawing smoking in restaurants and bars (even those with specially ventilated smoking areas), making it illegal to smoke in a car containing a child (including, memorably, even if the child is a teenager who is also smoking), and forcing convenience store owners to cover up their cigarette displays, lest a child see a brightly coloured box and become a tobacco addict by default. All of these steps clearly demonstrate that Ontario is aware of, and concerned about, smoking. Yet I can still buy a pack at my local convenience store. Hmm.

May 19, 2012

“Shared values” can only take you so far in the market

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Tim Worstall responds to a short snippet from the Telegraph, lauding the “shared values” marketing approach exemplified by the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream firm:

But of course, this only works with those who share or desire those values that you are pushing. And there are some very different value systems out there. There is an, admittedly and thankfully very small, market out there for a company whose values include being beastly to Jews. I don’t think it will shock anyone at all to hear that there really are racists in our society who would respond to having their idiocy pandered to. Or sexists, capitalists, neoliberals and all sorts of groups that have slightly different value systems from those put forward by Ben and Jerry’s.

[. . .]

So, companies that appeal to the values of their potential customers: yup, great idea. Have fun and make money. But I’m afraid you cannot complain if some of them appeal to values you don’t share: for many will not share the values that you push.

Which leads then to the joy of this market thing. Companies that do define themselves by these values get to compete for the attentions of those who care about such things. Those catering to the rarer prejudices will either fail or stay small, those who cater to the mass ones successfully will prosper and grow fat. Which is excellent, isn’t it?

April 19, 2012

The (richly deserved) end of the Tory era in Alberta

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Unless all the polls are way off, the election in Alberta will see the eternal rule of the Progressive Conservatives finally come to an end. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, the Tories have unleashed the last of their secret weapons to hold back the Wildrose barbarians — perhaps the most embarrassing political video ever posted. David J. Climenhaga saves you the pain of watching the video:

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called “I never thought I’d vote PC.”

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

I mean, really, telling young voters you understand why they’d “rather gouge their eyes out than vote Conservative” in an effort to get them to vote Conservative is just … embarrassing.

[. . .]

After this pathetic excuse for a Tory campaign, the tattered remnants of the Alberta Conservatives have less dignity left than Saddam Hussein when he was hauled out of his hidey-hole in Tikrit by the soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division! This little video squib is just the final excruciating evidence before our eyes notice that the moribund Conservatives’ best-before date has passed.

I’m not kidding about the quality of the video — I couldn’t make it past the first minute before feeling too humiliated on behalf of the folks who made it and I had to shut it off. If you want to watch it in all its cringe-inducing glory, David has it embedded on his site.

March 19, 2012

Finland’s cold-cut warrior, RIP

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

The most unusual cold war hero died recently. Eero Iloniemi tells the story of Finland’s Väinö Purje and how his TV commercials featured in the Cold War in the Baltic:

While Purje is virtually unknown in the West his exploits are legendary in the Baltic States, especially in Estonia. Alo Lohmus of Estonia’s leading daily Postimees referred to Purje’s contribution to the Cold War as part of a ‘spiritual nuclear bomb’ that blew apart a corrupt system.

High praise, indeed, for a modest tradesman. That a butcher could gain such a position in a global conflict is one of the most curious chapters of Cold War history.

Due to its proximity to the Baltic Soviet republics, Finnish television broadcasts penetrated the Iron Curtain, into Estonia and on occasion Latvia. Purje, who was the star of Finnish retail chain Kesko’s food adverts, became a cult figure in Estonia. From 1974 to 1981 he featured in more than 100 television spots showcasing sausages and cutlets, all virtually unknown in the then Soviet republics.

March 7, 2012

Robot barf

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

An amusing article at the Guardian about those hard-to-avoid QR codes:

The idea behind a Quick Response (QR) code is pretty simple, even useful, when applied correctly. You snap a picture of a code and your mobile phone whisks you off to a web page — no typing necessary. The problem is that the vast majority of people have no idea what the codes are, or that they are supposed to interact with them.

Most people look at a QR code and see “robot barf”, but marketers seem to think they are a must-have technology for their advertising campaigns. In their minds, eager consumers wander around with their smartphones, scanning square codes wherever they appear. As a result, the codes appear just about everywhere, and often in some really absurd places.

Being strangely fascinated by their misuse, we decided to collaborate on a Tumblr, wtfqrcodes, to document this ridiculous trend. We started the blog with about a dozen of our own pictures and invited visitors to submit their pictures as well. That’s where we’ve gotten some of our best stuff – we’ve been amazed at some of the places QR codes show up. It’s obvious that most companies just don’t understand the technology … and that’s a recipe for some very funny posts.

Used as they were originally intended, you encounter a bit of robot barf like this one:

You take a picture of it and it opens a URL or provides other encoded information. If it’s in a printed ad or on a billboard, you probably have an idea where it’ll take you. Encountering them outside their “natural habitat”: just the bare QR code with no other information, you don’t know where it’ll take you or what kind of content it’ll provide.

March 6, 2012

Michael Kinsley: Of course it’s insincere

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and I’m not likely to start listening in the near future, so my concern about “Slutpocalypse” is neither deep nor lasting. Limbaugh used the term “slut” to describe a Georgetown law student who was pleading for free or subsidized birth control. He then was forced to apologize, and the apology was deemed insincere by media commentators far and wide. Michael Kinsley points out that they went about it in the wrong way to garner a sincere apology:

The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers.

Well, of course he wasn’t sincere. And of course he was only apologizing to pacify advertisers — who were getting pressured to pressure Limbaugh by these very critics. Oh, there might have been a political calculation, too, that he’d gone too far for the good of his ratings or his celebrityhood. But any apology induced in these circumstances is almost by definition insincere. You can’t demand a public recantation and then expect sincerity along with the humble pie. If they wanted a sincere apology, Limbaugh’s critics would have had to defend his right to make these offensive remarks, and then attempt to change his mind using nothing but sweet reason. Go ahead and try.

[. . .]

Of course, the insincerity is on both sides. The pursuers all pretend to be horrified and “saddened” by this unexpected turn of events. In fact, they are delighted. Why not? Their opponent has committed the cardinal political sin: a gaffe.

A gaffe, as someone once said, is when a politician tells the truth. This is a bit imprecise. The term “politician” covers any political actor, certainly including Rush. And the troublesome statement needn’t be the truth, as it certainly wasn’t in this case: more like “the truth about what he or she is really thinking.” The typical gaffe is what they used to call a “Freudian slip.” But, with all due respect to Freud, why should something a politician says by accident — and soon wishes he or she never said, whether true or not — automatically be taken as a better sign of his or her real thinking than something he or she says on purpose?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

February 5, 2012

Your Super Bowl TV watching schedule

Filed under: Football, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Scott Stinson charts exactly what will happen over the long, long, long, long, long, long, long hours of the pre-game show leading up to kickoff sometime in the next 48 hours:

Planning to watch the Super Bowl? A little leery about the six-and-a-half-hour pre-game show? Fear not, we can provide you with an approximate guide for what you will see. Read this, then spend time with your family instead. Win-win! (All times approximate, by which we mean made up.)

12:00 p.m. NBC’s broadcast is coming to you live from Indianapolis, which means we begin with Bob Costas trying to: (a) argue that Indianapolis is a great place and that the game is somehow more meaningful for being there; and (b) keep a straight face

12:32 p.m. First shot of Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski walking on his injured ankle. Will he play? Will he be effective? Fortunately, we have six hours to listen to people come up with ever more inventive ways to say “maybe.”

12:45 p.m. Costas gives an earnest speech about Indianapolis, home of the iconic Colts franchise. Not mentioned: Most of the iconic stuff happened in Baltimore, before the owner snuck the team out of town in the dead of night. In Indy, the history of the franchise’s fortunes can be summed up as “crappycrappycrappyPeytonManningcrappy.”

1:02 p.m. Time to soak in some of the exciting moments from the official “tailgate” party, which is in fact nowhere near a parking lot. Musical act falls under the category of “Popular Enough Once That Some People in Audience Have Heard of Them, But Not So Popular That We Would Want Them on TV For Long.” So, Fleetwood Mac, Alabama or 3 Doors Down.

1:04 p.m. The real question here is whether the performance rivals that of the tailgate party a few years back, when Journey appeared and caused America to collectively wonder when Steve Perry turned into a Fillipino guy with long hair.

Update: For those of you who only watch the Super Bowl for the ads (and I know there are lots of you), Reuters has most of the “big” ads collated into one post for your convenience. This is especially useful for those of us north of the 49th parallel, where many of the ads will be overlaid with the same crappy commercials we’ve seen all year. I’m not normally a fan of “there ought to be a law” solutions, but I’d be less than upset if CRTC regulations prohibited showing the same commercial 6-8 times per hour. (If nothing else, that level of repetition probably irritates potential customers more than it attracts them.)

Update, 6 February: It looks like the Reuters collection in the first update was intended to emphasize the lamest of the ads. There’s another collection in the National Post with more. (I don’t follow hockey, but I did think the Budweiser hockey ad was well done, even if they just stole the idea from an improv group.)

February 3, 2012

Great moments in advertising

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

This is not one of them:

BMW apologized after a PR strategy to pay for the naming rights to a weather system backfired — that system turned into the deep freeze that’s claimed dozens of lives across Europe.

The goal was to promote BMW’s Mini Cooper brand by paying Germany’s meteorological office 299 euros ($392) to name a system “Cooper” — a practice in place since 2002 to help fund weather monitoring work in Germany. Unfortunately for BMW, the system it was assigned to turned out to be a killer.

On the face of it, this seems like a pretty stupid notion: pay money to associate your brand with a major weather disturbance? Didn’t BMW’s PR folks notice that the association most people have with named weather is negative?

February 1, 2012

The wonders of selection, or why it now takes you an hour to find “just the right item” at the store

Filed under: Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

Monty (who just joined Twitter) linked to a Reason article on the glories of choice we have available to us in the western world. Monty’s comment:

The glories of capitalism, as expressed in the salty-snacks aisle of the supermarket. When you have a surfeit of a good or service, the value-add stops being the utility-value of the good and instead becomes esthetics or status. That’s why rich people drive Rolls Royces and Ferraris instead of Toyotas and Fords. As cars, they all do pretty much the same thing and in pretty much the same way; but the value-add of a Ferrari lies in aspects not directly related to the utility value of the vehicle. You can say the same about nearly any other commodity class, from clothes to electronics…to snack foods.

And the A Barton Hinkle article he links to:

But you don’t have to research the past 50 years of product flops to make the case. Just check a vending machine. There you will find every possible combination and interpolation of snack food. In the potato chip category alone — we don’t have time to look at crackers, cheese puffs, corn chips, or cookies — one finds not just barbecue- or cheddar-flavored chips, but chili cheese, cool ranch, ragin’ ranch, habanero, cheddar jalapeno, hot sauce, honey cheese, creamy chipotle, Mediterranean herb, and ketchup-flavored chips.

It’s obvious what’s going on here. Like every other industry, America’s snack-food makers live in deathly fear that the other guys are going to come up with the next “disruptive innovation” first, so everyone is trying to innovate as fast as they can. The poor sots in middle management have been told next year’s raise depends on producing X amount of revenue from new products. But there are only so many truly new products you can think up. Answer? Combine existing products the way you choose from a Chinese take-out menu: one from Column A, one from Column B. …

This seems to be the method at Hammacher Schlemmer — the fine folks who bring you must-have products like the bath mat/alarm clock and the remote-control pillow. It seems to work for them. So why not try it with snack food? Pickle-flavored potato chips, that’s why. Who needs all that ridiculous junk? Your basic potato-flavored potato chip was good enough for our ancestors and by gad sir, it should be good enough for us.

Or at least this is my attitude when standing before a vending machine. Whisk me into an office-supply store, however, and the tune suddenly changes. I am among those who have a weak spot — call it a fetish, call it an obsession — for school supplies. Pens, especially.

January 16, 2012

It may be pseudoscientific gibberish, but it makes a good newspaper headline

Filed under: Health, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

It’s pretty much a certainty that your local newspaper and radio stations have been busy pushing the meme that today is “Blue Monday“. It’s actually a bit of advertising creativity that’s metastasized:

January is a depressing time for many. The weather’s awful, you get less daylight than a stunted dandelion and your body is struggling to cope with the withdrawal of the depression-alleviating calorific foods, such as chocolate, of the hedonistic festive period. January is one long post-Christmas hangover.

So there are many reasons why someone may feel particularly “down” during January. But every year, much of the media become fixated on a specific day — the third Monday in January — as the most depressing of the year. It has become known as Blue Monday.

This silly claim comes from a ludicrous equation that calculates “debt”, “motivation”, “weather”, “need to take action” and other arbitrary variables that are impossible to quantify and largely incompatible.

True clinical depression (as opposed to a post-Christmas slump) is a far more complex condition that is affected by many factors, chronic and temporary, internal and external. What is extremely unlikely (i.e. impossible) is that there is a reliable set of external factors that cause depression in an entire population at the same time every year.

But that doesn’t stop the equation from popping up every year. Its creator, Dr Cliff Arnall, devised it for a travel firm. He has since admitted that it is meaningless (without actually saying it’s wrong).

January 7, 2012

Booth babes = company with shitty products or zero new ideas

Filed under: Humour, Media, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

A useful rant about the companies who depend on “booth babes” to draw attention at trade shows:

CES, like many industry conventions, will be thick with “booth babes” — women paid to stand around in revealing clothing in order to draw men to the booths and see terrible products. That’s regrettable. Not only because it is sexist, but also because it just makes your company look like a bunch of undersexed nimrods.

If the only way you can get people interested in your product is to have a scantily clad woman appear next to it for no apparent reason, your products are probably awful. And besides, it’s boring. It’s just boring. It’s been done so many times, for so many years, that my only reaction to seeing a booth bunny is to think, “Here is a company that is completely out of ideas.”

Look, technology industry CEOs, if you want to stick a butt in my face, I’d be way more impressed if you made it your own fat ass. Butter up that big white rump of yours and squeeze it into a little red thong. Strap those mantits into a cheetah bra that lets your pale hairy cleavage see the light of day. Do that, and I promise you that I’ll listen to your pitch. (Even if it’s a little awkward for both of us!) Better yet, get the whole pasty, overpaid, C-level crew into some sexy swimwear. People will talk. You’ll be the buzz.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked (on the technology side) at companies who spent nearly as much time and effort hiring and “costuming” their booth babes as they did on the actual marketing campaign for their products. I don’t currently work with firms who do this, thank goodness.

January 4, 2012

Infographics: big, eye-catching … and too often badly misleading

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

Megan McArdle’s year-end plea to stop the Infographic Plague:

If you look at these lovely, lying infographics, you will notice that they tend to have a few things in common:

  1. They are made by random sites without particularly obvious connection to the subject matter. Why is Creditloan.com making an infographic about the hourly workweek?
  2. Those sites, when examined, either have virtually no content at all, or are for things like debt consolidation — industries with low reputation where brand recognition, if it exists at all, is probably mostly negative.
  3. The sources for the data, if they are provided at all, tend to be in very small type at the bottom of the graphic, and instead of easy-to-type names of reports, they provide hard-to-type URLs which basically defeat all but the most determined checkers.
  4. The infographics tend to suggest that SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS HAPPENING IN THE US RIGHT NOW!!! the better to trigger your panic button and get you to spread the bad news BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

The infographics are being used to get unwitting bloggers to drive up their google search rankings. When they get a link from Forbes, or a blogger like Andrew Sullivan — who is like Patient Zero for many of these infographics — Google thinks they must be providing valuable information. Infographics are so good at getting this kind of attention that web marketing people spend a lot of time writing articles about how you can use them to boost your SEO (search engine optimization).

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