Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2025

International FAFO – Ontario pokes Trump, Trump withdraws from trade talks

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadian politicans seem unable to comprehend that Donald Trump is not a typical American leader — for both good and bad — and Ontario Premier Doug Ford seems to be the last one to figure it out. The Ontario government paid for ads featuring Ronald Reagan making anti-tariff comments to run in the US media and Trump reacted, strongly:

The Ontario government’s anti-U.S. tariff ad will run multiple times during the U.S. broadcast of baseball’s World Series game Friday, less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump “terminated” trade talks with Canada over the commercial.

In an email, Ontario Premier Doug Ford spokesperson Hannah Jensen confirmed information first reported by National Post that the ads will run throughout the World Series.

That means the ads, taken out by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government, will be playing to a primetime U.S. audience less than a day after Trump cited them as the reason he was ending trade talks with Canada.

The Toronto Blue Jays are vying for the World Series championship for the first time in over three decades.

The move suggests Ford is not ready to back down on his public campaign against U.S. tariffs on key Ontarian industries including auto manufacturing despite Trump’s ire.

Late Thursday evening, Trump took aim at Ontario’s ads which quote a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan to fight against U.S. tariffs.

“The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000,” Trump wrote on social media.

“They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT.”

On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada stands ready to resume trade talks with the Trump administration. But he stopped short of opining on if Ontario should cease running the ads.

If there’s a wrong way to deal with Donald Trump, you can be sure that some Canadian politician — often, but not always, Doug Ford — will find it:

Outside of the light conservatism found in the AM Talk radio circuit throughout the GTA, Ontarians didn’t really seem all that fired up when it was discovered that Premier Doug Ford spent $75 million on anti-tariff ads, the most contentious involving an audio clip of former Republican president Ronald Reagan, to be played in American cities targeting Republican audiences. They, for the most part, are also unlikely to appreciate the insult, and the damage it caused, by going directly to Trump’s base with a message that undermines the premise of his economic plan. In Canada, leaders like Ford and Carney, are permitted and even encouraged to talk tough on Trump, because it is well understood that Trump Derangement Syndrome is the leading cause of anxiety amongst Canadian leftists, and sadly, even many so-called conservatives. However, it has always been hollow, toothless, and pointless.

Carney’s elbow’s up nonsense is easily the most embarrassing thing produced by Canada in the last four decades (maybe longer). And Doug Ford is such a clueless dummy, conservative in name only, with NDP levels of TDS, and an incredibly irresponsible propensity to go off half-cocked, with such a careless abundance of volatility. No serious province can survive a leader like this. Ford is what Leftists think Trump is: a dangerous blundering idiot who can’t get anything right. But this thing with the Reagan ad is maybe the worst example in a long list of Ford blundering. Maybe Trump’s anger will blow over, maybe we will somehow come out of this episode embarrassed, yet again, but for the most part, unscathed. We will have to wait and see.

As much as I wish Canada was a force to be reckoned with, as it once was, the best I can muster is that some day in the distant future other countries might stop laughing at us. The sad reality is that generations of abysmal Laurentian elite leadership has destroyed the strength and respectability of Canada. We are a weak insignificant joke of a nation made that way by a grossly feminized ultra-weak leftist leadership class. Ford and Carney with their ineffective provocations directed at Trump in order to appease and win points with the TDS numbskull segment of the Canadian population, does little more than show the nation, and the world, the opportunism and lack of self-awareness indicative of all weak and clueless men of the social justice paradigm in the great feminized north.

To make matters worse, as if the largest and most rapidly expanding national debt in the history of Canada, the general complacency concerning government spending, or the massive affordability crises were not enough, it appears that Ford’s ad team manipulated the content of the Ronald Reagan speech they used in order to make it appear as if Reagan were anti-tariff. The ad stitches together non-consecutive segments of a five minute speech he gave in 1987. Again, the ad in question was part of a $75 million marketing campaign, paid for by Ontario tax-payers, which targeted American audiences.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute stated that “The ad misrepresents the presidential radio address, and the Government of Ontario did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks”.

Nice work, Doug. You can stop any time now …

Update: Fixed broken URL.

August 3, 2025

20th century advertising alchemy rediscovered

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Much sound and fury has been devoted to the ritual denunciations of American Eagle and their new ad campaign featuring blatant Nazi ideology and imagery, er, I mean Sydney Sweeney:

Whenever I endure a sentence which trespasses into a jibe about whiteness or men or some other illusory bugbear, I stop reading and launch the laptop through the window. This week, I’ve cleaned out eBay. As one delivery driver lugs a fresh laptop to my front door, another scoops up the last to fall from the sky.

Those all-too-common laments about skin colour or genitalia are the scarlet letter imprinted on the chest of the thoughtless bore. It’s a mind virus without antidote. Screeching “whiteness!” upon snapping one’s shoelace betrays sound psychological health.

Take Sydney Sweeney, an American actress blessed with a merciless, unfair genetic inheritance. This week, Sydney broke the internet. Her crime? She’s rather attractive. Worse yet, Sydney flaunts her icy, Scandinavian beauty.

In an advert for American Eagle, the dewy, lissom blonde squeezes her gymnastic body into a pair of denim jeans. Smouldering before the camera, Sydney flutters her “great genes”.

Those great genes sashay around a classic Mustang — 400 horses of unapologetic masculine energy. Sydney pats her hypnotic behind. She fires up that climate-melting engine. The infernal marriage of masculine-feminine consummates as she roars off into the distance.

Advertisers know what they did. Diana, Roman goddess and huntress of men. Her chariot, the male appendage made steel and exploding gasoline. A combination to light our monkey brains on fire. The symbolism hijacks our amygdala: buy these jeans, and she’s yours. Or, for the other sex, buy these and manipulate them.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, reader. Those claims, as primitive as they may appear, are the animating spirit of advertising. Back in the 1920s, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, transplanted Uncle Siggy’s theories into the advertising business. Out went staid adverts praising a product’s utility. In went adverts selling visions of your unconscious, insatiable self. Bernays transformed the public relations and advertising worlds. He sold products that stirred the galloping herds of the subconscious mind.

Take cigarettes. Before Bernays, smoking was a decidedly male pursuit. Tobacco giants, keen to double their potential customer pool, turned to him. Bernays transformed smoking from a vulgar, unladylike pastime into a symbol of freedom and female empowerment. Men buy Patek Phillipe watches for the same reason. As Dave Chappelle put it: “If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house”.

In just a few moments, Sweeney’s serpentine hips lulled advertising away from overt wokeness to its subliminal witchcraft. It worked. American Eagle’s stock surged fifteen percent.

For research, I studied the ad twenty-seven times. Your humble narrator bought thirty-seven pairs of jeans and then signed over his entire inheritance to Ms Sweeney.

The reaction on the identitarian left authored five additional chapters to the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

By teasing the words “genes” and “jeans”, Sweeney called for the annexation of Poland and the Sudetenland. MSNBC excelled itself, even birthing a new pidgin English indecipherable to 97 percent of native speakers:

“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness”.

Well, that’s one way to think about it.

July 31, 2025

QotD: Web browsing “naked”

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I recently, foolishly, and for reasons that now escape me, bathed in the stroboscopic glow of the un-adblocked Daily Mail. It’s like they just took a bag full of flashing random crap, shook it up, then threw it at the screen. I’m not at all convinced that advertising is a viable model for internet use. It feels much more intrusive and aggravating than print or TV ads. Partly, I suppose, because it’s happening on your device. Maybe it’s just me, but I find myself repelled by it, and sites that use it, quite emphatically. I’ve stopped counting the sites I’ll no longer visit because they insist on the reader deactivating their adblocker, resulting in an insulting, actively hostile, all but unusable experience.

David Thompson, commenting on “Scenes from Woketopia”, davidthompson.com, 2020-06-23.

July 22, 2025

The internet keeps getting worse. Let’s talk about why.

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jared Henderson
Published 16 Jul 2025

Why do major online platforms keep getting worse? Cory Doctorow’s work helps us understand the pattern of growth, decline, and eventual demise.

→ Timestamps
00:00 Beginning
00:51 How Platforms Die
08:29 The Death of a Platform (From the Inside)
12:14 Ads, Everywhere
14:47 Yes, I Make Money from Ads
16:32 Bots
22:04 The Internet We Need
(more…)

June 13, 2025

The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:

The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.

If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.

But that’s not true anymore.

In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.

It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.

It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.

Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:

  • Do NOT try to close.
  • Do NOT try to sell.
  • Do NOT try to persuade.
  • Don’t even listen.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.

Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.

You will pay just to get rid of the ad.

In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.

That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.

And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.

[…]

We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.

But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.

They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.

March 1, 2025

Celebrity fatigue

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve always been pretty disinterested in products and services with celebrity endorsements, but they must have worked well enough as they suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Grant McCracken notes that they seem to have reached their sell-by date recently:

Wayne Gretzky Estates produces wine and other beverages in the Niagara Peninsula. They may be fine products, but I’ve never tried them.

Talented, wealthy, beautiful, admired, they live charmed lives.

Until the last decade or so. Now they take turns doing an Icarus off the high board.

And investors are noticing.

Ann Gehan reports “Investors Drop Celebrity Brands From A-List”.

    Four early-stage investors who previously backed celebrity brands said they are shifting focus to promising products as opposed to celebrity buzz

What are investors noticing?

Well, there was COVID. We all noticed how really irritating celebs were, singing us songs from the well staffed majesty of their magnificent homes. This cost them some standing.

And then there was the presidential elections. Say what you will about Kamala, the celebs who supported her must have worried about a loss.

Right?

Of course not.

Celebrities don’t lose elections. Neither do the politicians they support.

So the election too was costly.

You don’t get famous unless you know how to read the room. Celebs are their own strategists. They can hear what the country wants. They can detect change and adapt.

Until they can’t. And now they can’t.

February 21, 2025

Tech enshittification continues

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia notes that even the world’s biggest search engine provider is doing almost everything it can to make your search experiences worse and worse:

Almost everything in the digital world is turning into its opposite.

  • Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life.
  • ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody.
  • Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships.
  • Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice — instead peddling products of dubious efficacy.
  • Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

You can often tell by the name. PayPal will never pay you a penny, and it’s certainly not your pal. Microsoft Teams only works if you stay away from your team. If you keep using Safari, you will never go on an actual Safari.

But the worst reversal is happening with search engines. They now prevent you from searching.

I’ve known Google up close and personal from the start. I initially found the company quirky and endearing — but those days ended long ago. The company is now clueless and creepy.

Almost every day I read some ugly news story about Google. Here are a few headlines from a typical week:

This company goes out of its ways to do mischief. Messing with people is in its DNA.

Meanwhile, its base business is degrading at an alarming rate. The company doesn’t seem to care.

In a strange turnaround, search engines don’t want you to search for anything. That’s because searching leads you on a journey — and Google doesn’t want you to leave their platform.

The search engine was invented as your gateway to the web. The inventors of this technology tried to index every page on the Internet — so that you could find anything and everything.

That was an exciting era. Search engines were like train stations or airports. They took you all over the world.

At Google today, the goal is the exact opposite. You never leave the station.

Techies once described the Internet as a digital highway. But we need a different metaphor nowadays. Web platforms want to trap you on their app, and keep you there forever.

So, instead of a digital highway, we have a digital roach motel. They let the roaches check in — but not check out.

February 14, 2025

Trump may start paying attention to Canadian cultural protectionist polices next

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist points out just how many Canadian federal policies and programs will likely come under scrutiny by the Trump administration for their blatant protectionism against US cultural products:

My Globe and Mail op-ed argues the need for change is particularly true for Canadian digital and cultural policy. Parliamentary prorogation ended efforts at privacy, cybersecurity and AI reforms and U.S. pressure has thrown the future of a series of mandated payments – digital service taxes, streaming payments and news media contributions – into doubt. But the Trump tariff escalation, which now extends to steel and aluminum as well as the prospect of reviving the original tariff plan in a matter of weeks, signals something far bigger that may ultimately render current Canadian digital and cultural policy unrecognizable.

Our cultural frameworks are largely based on decades-old policies premised on marketplace protections and mandated support payments. This included foreign ownership restrictions in the cultural sector and requirements that broadcasters contribute a portion of their revenues to support Canadian content production.

As we moved from an analog to digital world, the government simply extended those policies to the digital realm. But with Mr. Trump appearing to call out what he views to be Canadian protectionist policies in sensitive sectors such as banking ownership, the cultural and digital sectors may be next.

If so, there are no shortage of long-standing policies that tilt the playing field in favour of Canadians that could spark some uncomfortable conversations.

Why do U.S. companies face ownership restrictions in the telecom and broadcast sectors? Why are Canadian broadcasters permitted to block U.S. television signals in order to capture increased advertising revenue? Why do Canadian content rules exclude U.S. companies from owning productions featuring predominantly Canadian talent?

The Canadian response that this is how it has always been is unlikely to persuade Mr. Trump.

Canadian policies premised on “making web giants pay” may also be non-starters under Mr. Trump. For the past five years, the Canadian government seemingly welcomed the opportunity to sabre rattle with U.S. internet companies. This led to mandated payments for streaming services to support Canadian film, television and music production; link taxes that targeted Meta and Google to help Canadian news outlets; and the multibillion-dollar retroactive digital services tax that is primarily aimed at U.S. tech giants.

Not only have those policies raised consumer affordability and marketplace competition concerns, they have also emerged as increasingly contentious trade issues. If the trade battles with the U.S. continue, the pressure to scale back the policies will mount.

Beyond rethinking established cultural and digital policies both new and old, the bigger changes may come from re-evaluating the competitive impact of policies that rely heavily on regulation just as the U.S. prioritizes economic growth through deregulation. Proposed Canadian privacy, online harms and AI rules have all relied heavily on increased regulation, looking to Europe as the model.

For example, consider the Canadian approach to AI regulation in the now-defunct Artificial Intelligence and Data Act. It specifically referenced the European Union’s regulatory system, which establishes extensive regulatory requirements for high-risk AI systems and bans some AI systems altogether.

However, the European approach is not the only game in town. Mr. Trump moved swiftly to cancel the former Biden administration’s executive order on AI regulation, signalling that the U.S. will prioritize deregulation in pursuit of global AI leadership. Further, the arrival of DeepSeek, the Chinese answer to ChatGPT, took the world by storm and served notice that U.S. AI dominance is by no means guaranteed.

The competing approaches – U.S.-style lightweight regulation that favours economic growth against a more robust European regulatory model that emphasizes AI guardrails and public protections – will force difficult policy choices that Canada has thus far avoided.

December 26, 2024

QotD: The essence of journalism

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Journalism is the craft of filling in the white bits between the advertisements.

It’s not a profession, it’s not a calling and it has no public purpose. Trial and error has shown that peeps out there just won’t go out and buy booklets of adverts. They won’t even pay all that much attention to free books of them stuffed through their letterboxes as local freesheets show.

In order to get people to see the piccies of fine cavalry twill trousers (an ad that has been running beside the Telegraph crossword for at least four decades), or to drool over offers of lushly organic bath salts, experience has indicated that someone needs to be employed to write about the footie – see that parrot bein’ sick? – or the weather – cloudy with a chance of meatballs – or the thespian who should only have been stepped out with – Meghan Steals Our Prince! – or you know what they’re doing with your money – Tax Rise Shocker! – to fill in the blanks between the commercial offers.

And that’s it. That’s what we do.

We can even prove this. The editorial line of absolutely every publication is one that follows the prejudices of its readers. When setting up a new one the big question is, well, who are we going to appeal to? Not what truths are we going to tell but who will look at the ads based upon the truths we decide to tell.

All that speaking truth to power, interrogation of structures and inequalities, that’s for the awards season. It has as much to do with reality as calling politicians statesmen – entirely irrelevant to the working day and something more suited to those dead.

Entirely true that journalism comes in flavours, even layers, styles and stratified along socioeconomic lines. But then so do restaurants come in manners that appeal to different audiences despite their output all ending up in the same place – the U-bend – some limited number of hours after consumption.

Journalism is simply entertainment that is, journalists just those who do so with words. There is a market for that truth-telling to power stuff, just as there is one for vegan meals. But they’re both limited to those who are entertained by such which is why Maccy D’s bestrides the world and the Mail and The Sun outsell Tribune, Counterpunch and Salon.

Tim Worstall, “The Grandiosity Of Modern Journalism”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-02.

October 22, 2024

The “Man Enough” ad for the Harris campaign

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo on the amazing political artifact that was the “Man Enough” ad by Kamala Harris supporters trying to persuade men to vote for her:

I wasn’t going to write anything about the “Man Enough” political ad that came out last week, an awkward attempt to woo male voters by a group calling itself Creatives for Harris (a “grassroots collective of ad execs, TV writers, and comedians“). The ad acknowledges a growing gender divide in the U.S. presidential election, especially among younger voters, as feminist belief or lack thereof has become a significant indicator of party affiliation.

By the time I had heard of the ad, there were already dozens of reactions to its bizarre masculine stereotypes and ponderous feminist messaging. It has been called “the Mount Everest of Unintentional Comedy“, “The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever” and “an attempt to gain votes by insulting the people it’s courting“. (It also received plaudits from many voters who support Harris.)

Cramming into 90 seconds every feminist cliché of the past two decades about regressive and progressive masculinities, the ad was so cartoonishly overdone as to leave some viewers unsure whether it was a parody or not. How could anyone have thought that undecided male voters would respond positively to an obese chicken farmer boasting about his ability to rebuild carburetors, or a muscular black man telling us that dead-lifting weights doesn’t prevent him from “braiding the sh*t out of my daughter’s hair”.

All of the men in the ad, after first touting their hyper-macho proclivities (for weight-lifting, steak, Bourbon, motorcycles, trucks, hay bales), then assure us that as manly men (“I’m a man, man,” says one), they are more than willing to emote, cry, and — above all — give support to “women who take charge”. I’m surprised we weren’t also told how happy they are to vacuum, and to take submissive postures during sex.

Being pro-woman, according to the ad, means supporting every choice a woman could make, including killing her unborn baby. The ad even comes with an accusatory warning near the end: real men like these are “sick of so-called men domineering, belittling, and controlling women just so they can feel more powerful”.

Statements from the ad’s main creator, Jacob Reed, a comic who has worked for Jimmy Kimmel Live and other productions, proclaimed the ad a genuine attempt to appeal to men, a humorous yet sincere invitation for them to embrace pro-feminist masculinity. Reed mentioned in interview that earlier versions of the ad, which had actually been even more preachy and censorious, with lines like “I’m not afraid of a woman having rights because what kind of creep would I be then?” had been toned down out of respect for male viewers.

“Reed realized the last thing he wanted to do was condescend to his potential audience,” wrote Fast Company author Joe Berkowitz approvingly. “Ultimately, he decided viewers would be savvy enough to intuit the negative implications of the opposing viewpoint without having it spelled out.” How broad-minded of Reed not to spell out the loathsomeness of non-feminist men!

Far from offering a parody of feminist dogma, then, the ad was a straight-up celebration of it.

September 1, 2024

The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany

Filed under: Business, Food, Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:

In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.

Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …

… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.

That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:

    Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?

    If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”

    Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.

    And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.

    So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.

For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:

There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.

August 21, 2024

The Great Enshittification – technological progress is now actually regressing

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia provides ten reasons why all our lovely shiny technological improvements have turned into a steady stream of enshittified “updates” that reduce functionality, add unwanted “improvements” and make things significantly less reliable:

By my measure, this reversal started happening around a decade ago. If I had to sum things up in a conceptual chart, it would look like this:

The divergence was easy to ignore at first. We’re so familiar with useful tech that many of us were slow to notice when upgrades turned into downgrades.

But the evidence from the last couple years is impossible to dismiss. And we can’t blame COVID (or other extraneous factors) any longer. Technology is increasingly making matters worse, not better — and at an alarming pace.

[…]

But I have avoided answering, up until now, the biggest question — which is why is this happening?

Or, to be more specific, why is this happening now?

Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted.

What caused this shift?

That’s a big issue. Unless we understand how things went wrong, we can’t begin to fix them. Otherwise we’re just griping — about bad software or greedy CEOs or whatever.

It’s now time to address the causes, not just complain about symptoms.

Once we do that, we can move to the next steps, namely outlining a regimen for recovery and an eventual cure.

So let me try to lay out my diagnosis as clearly as I can. Below are the ten reasons why tech is now breaking bad.

I apologize in advance for speaking so bluntly. Many will be upset by my frankness. But the circumstances — and the risks involved — demand it.

July 29, 2024

W.H. Smith attempts to rebrand their stores to “raise awareness” or something

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

British bookseller from time immemorial, W.H. Smith, apparently decided that the corporate branding they’d been using since the 18th century was just too boring for modern consumers, so they brainstormed a daring new design for the 21st century … that sucked.

When the British retailer, W.H. Smith, rebranded its logo last year, confusion and bafflement ensued.

The high street fixture, its Times New Roman logo mostly unchanged since 1792, earned its reputation by selling books, stationery, and for fleecing bleary-eyed travellers in airports. Through sheer zombie persistence, W.H. Smith remains a constant of British retail. Never mind the threadbare carpets, the general dilapidation, or the desperate staff forced to offer you a bottle of knock-off perfume with your twenty Lambert and Butler.

W.H. Smith endures because its business model concentrates on a captive audience. Go to an airport or a hospital — any place in which people cannot escape — and you’ll find a W.H. Smith reliably charging double for a Lucozade Sport. W.H. Smith will outlive Great Britain. The retailer’s existence — puzzling to the most scientific of minds — defies natural law.

Last year, creative designers attempted to play God. They sanded off the logo’s regnant edges and stripped “Smiths” altogether. The dynamic branding screamed minimalism: a plain, white “WHS” stamped on to a blue background.

I’d imagine the big revelation underwhelmed those paying for the work. “That’s interesting.” Or “It’s certainly different“.

Mockery ensued. “Baffling” said one. “It looks like the NHS logo,” observed another.

No doubt the designers plotted a revolution in design. Of course, these “creatives” — invariably young and invariably uncreative — fancied their vandalism as “forward thinking” and “dynamic”. I’ll wager at least one thought the new logo addressed the plight of some faraway progressive cause to which they subscribe. The public, unschooled in the most voguish developments in design, concluded: The new logo is shit.

W.H. Smith soon backtracked. Passive-aggressive defences of the staid new logo melted into sulky denial. It’s just a trial, they mewled.

A breathless spokesman revealed the truth. Or some addled version of the truth. The fresh signs, they revealed, were “designed to raise awareness of the products W.H. Smith sells”. What else, I wonder, is a shop sign meant to achieve?

The phrase “raising awareness” is one of a litany of linguistic evasions which say nothing. By shoehorning that ghastly phrase into a sentence, the speaker hopes to evade criticism. Reader, I’m not ploughing through a duty-free bottle of Chateau le Peuy Saincrit in the obscene Bulgarian sunshine. I’m raising awareness of the plight of southern French winemakers.

That passive-aggressive statement of the obvious — our shop sign raises awareness of our shop — you plebeian fools — crystallises the creative industry’s age problem.

Three-quarters of the creative industry is under 45. Perhaps this age gap (not the sexually consensual and fun kind) explains why so much of what we see and hear is cliché-riddled evasive hoo-hah.

When talking to anyone under 45, I mentally add a question mark to the end of their sentence. Millennials and Zoomers avoid declarative sentences. Listen. Almost every utterance sounds like a question. Further to this quirk, I note the adverbs and filler words. Young people stuff their speech with “basically”, “actually”, “literally”, and “like”. Zoomers are especially militant. They eschew capital letters. Capital letters are grammatical fascism. Full stops reveal a latent proclivity for Zyklon-B. Influencers add another tic to this repertoire of anxiety and unsurety. They crackle their voice as if a frog has lodged in their throat.

July 26, 2024

Latest Liberal ad totally DESTROYS Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you’re new here, you may not recognize my headline as being sarcastic. Here’s Chris Selley‘s attempt to figure out what the Liberal brain trust is up to with their latest anti-Tory ad:

“The CEO of Elections Canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say I’m at peace with that.”

These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the Liberal Party of Canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the Conservative leader is too wacky and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.

Read that sentence again. It’s supposed to be a scare quote. Are you scared? Or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? Removed from its context it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely even exists. It’s like someone negotiating the return date on their dry cleaning, or asking for no mayonnaise on their Whopper.

There’s another quote like that in the same 46-second video: “We’re Conservatives, so we don’t believe in that”.

Believe in what? No idea. Keynesian economics? The curse of the Oak Island treasure? Could be anything.

The notion that communications is the Liberals’ “problem” is as laughable as ever, but good grief are they ever terrible at communicating.

Usually politicians take other politicians’ quotes out of context to make them look bad. Here the Liberals have done … I really have no idea what. It’s like they’re so hopelessly ensconced in their echo chamber that they can’t tell which echoes have even escaped the chamber into the real world … if the real world even still exists.

Those intimately familiar with Poilievre’s parliamentary record (which is what, maybe 90 people in the world?) might surmise, correctly, that in the first instance he was talking in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the Harper government about Bill C-23. That was the 2014 legislation that, most controversially, toughened voter-ID requirements: Your voter-information card, delivered by mail, would no longer be sufficient proof of your identity to cast your ballot. You wouldn’t be able to “vouch” for another voter.

This was unnecessary, I felt at the time, and I might still, though the prospect of electoral fraud doesn’t make Liberal eyes roll quite as theatrically as it used to. But it seems clear the serious foreign interference in play is considerably smarter and more insidious than just sending some people to vote without proof of citizenship (which few of us offer up to vote as it stands).

Anyway, Poilievre was telling a Senate committee, on April 8, 2014, that he understood then chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand disagreed with the bill, and that he disagreed with Mayrand, and that he was “at peace with it.”

I do hope you were sitting down for that bombshell.

June 17, 2024

5 Foods that Changed Fast Food Forever (ft. @mythicalkitchen)

Filed under: Food, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Mar 8, 2024

The Mythical Kitchen Cookbook by Josh Scherer: https://amzn.to/49Se1qZ

Recipe at https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes
(more…)

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