Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2019

An excellent illustration of market segmentation

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

The Wikipedia entry for “market segmentation” defines it this way:

“BEER”by Jonnee is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Market segmentation is the activity of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers (known as segments) based on some type of shared characteristics. In dividing or segmenting markets, researchers typically look for common characteristics such as shared needs, common interests, similar lifestyles or even similar demographic profiles.

No single product is going to be universally popular, and it’s generally a bad idea to present it that way. The producers of a new product ideally try to identify the groups of potential customers who are more likely to want to buy the new product, and tailor their advertising to those groups. The more accurately they can identify and communicate with these customer groups, the greater the chances that the product will be a success in the market.

Beer isn’t universally popular (Gasp! Shock! Horror!), so brewers try to identify different kinds of beer drinkers and market their brews to those sub-groups:

The point about a market being that you can put your stuff out there and see who buys it. The buyers will – they are rational beings after all – select from the varied offerings and their selections will be the ones which best increase their utility by their own measurements of that utility. Thus the Shagmenowbigboypint might get a bit more business toward closing time, who knows? Not necessarily entirely female business either.

And even to stop being puerile about it. We’ve only this one system that does provide multiple choices – that’s what a market is. But in order for ever finer meeting of utility it’s necessary for ever finer slices of the market to be addressed. That is, we need to have free market entry so we can find out what it is that actually meets peoples’ desires.

Banning something that appeals to some slice of that market is thus defeating the point and object of that very market’s existence. Sure, lots of women won’t buy a sexist beer. Some will, as will some men. The aim and art of the whole exercise being to allow those who won’t not to, those who will to.

Or, as we can put it, every beer being Shagmenowbigboypint is as bad as no beer being Shagmenowbigboypint.

July 25, 2019

YouTube’s secret fight against history documentaries

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

The good folks at TimeGhost have been struggling with YouTube’s monetization and recommendation mechanisms for some time. A number of TimeGhost’s WW2 documentary videos have been demonetized over the last year, and the team noticed that every demonetized video had significantly fewer viewers than those that were not demonetized. They did some analysis and submitted the results to YouTube, showing that the demonetized videos were also being restricted from showing up on the automated recommendation lists that users see, which largely accounted for the lower viewership for their demonetized videos, but YouTube denied that there was any connection between these things … that demonetized videos are just as likely to be recommended as the ones that are not demonetized, and that TimeGhost’s analysis was just wrong. YouTube sent the TimeGhost team a set of guidelines for how to ensure that the videos they post were considered acceptable to advertisers and would not be subject to demonetization (and the stealth omission from recommendation lists). Here’s the first video from TimeGhost, implementing those guidelines:

This is how they explained the situation in the comments:

World War Two
3 hours ago (edited)
Now, to begin with – this is not about that we need YouTube’s ad money, at our viewership levels that money is not near enough to finance our content anyway. We have a fantastic community in the TimeGhost Army that support us financially, and make our shows possible, for which we are eternally grateful. This is also not about politics – nothing in our data indicates that YouTube is choosing what to monetize based on political considerations. However, indirectly this is about money, but even more importantly about our self-appointed mandate to share education about our common past. You see, when YouTube labels content as “not suitable for some, or most advertisers” they also recommend it less – in fact almost only under our own videos. This means that we don’t reach new viewers with those videos, this in turn means that our community grows less, or not at all.

When we sent the data proving that (data from YouTube no less), they at first denied that there was a connection between monetization and recommendation. We sent them more data showing conclusively that this is a false statement. Their response then was to say that maybe there is a connection between things that impact monetization and things that impact recommendation. They also sent us a list of things we should do to become “more advertiser friendly” – the list states among other things that content dealing with war, political controversies, terrorism, or death is not suitable for advertisers. That in effect means more or less the better part of human history and all of WW2.

We emphatically object to this interpretation of what is acceptable for advertisers – our kind of content has been attached to advertising for decades in main stream media, historical magazines and websites dealing with exactly the same things we do, receives advertising from major brands. Furthermore less recommendation means less viewers, which means that our content gets less support and thus risks becoming financially impossible – that is censorship by drip. Therefore we also vehemently protest this policy that in effect restricts the access to educational content, with high academic standards covering topics that are essential parts of human history. Events and phenomena that need to be widely understood in order for the world to learn from our past mistakes.

Last but not least we want to point out one more time – we do not have any indication whatsoever that we are being targeted for political reasons. We cover topics covering both right wing and left wing politics, we do not make judgement ourselves, instead we leave it up to you to decide positively or negatively depending on your opinion. We cover these topics factually, with completeness, and unbiased. The portion of our videos that have been deemed unsuitable to advertisers include political themes that cover the entire spectrum from Naziism to Marxism. Notably, and from the educational perspective troubling is that videos covering crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust or war crimes by the Soviet Union are almost always demonetized.

Please share this video to raise the awareness of what we find to be irresponsible behavior by a corporation that holds a virtual monopoly on free to access ad financed online video. Thank you.

July 20, 2019

A Bankrupt Germany Didn’t Create the Nazis | Between 2 Wars | 1928 Part 1 of 1

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 18 Jul 2019

When the world goes into economic overdrive in the second half of the 1920s, contrary to popular belief Germany rises with the tide – it is the Goldener Zwanziger, the Golden Twenties.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by Francis van Berkel and Spartacus Olsson
Directed and Produced by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited By: Daniel Weiss
Research by: Francis van Berkel

Sources:
Bundesarchiv, Photos from the Jonatan Myhre Barlien photo collection.

Colorization by Daniel Weiss
Thumbnail motive by Olga Shirnina
https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/201…

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

May 20, 2019

A “cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic” view of the modern economy

Filed under: Business, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren explains some of his disquietude about our modern world:

Gentle reader may object that none of these entities is a government department, except insofar as it is the subject of taxes and regulations, and as it grows larger, an ever more formidable force in lobbying for subsidies and legislation favourable to itself. Objection sustained. Verily, this is just my point.

Each entity made its way until the gobbling by means of mass consumer advertising, in which morally illegitimate methods of persuasion — principally hype, actual lies, irrelevant claims and endorsements — are instrumental to sales success. Honest advertising (e.g. catalogues with exact descriptions) is theoretically possible but practically extinct; campaigns are based on the tawdry manipulation of human “perceptions” — behaviourist psychology at the level of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, but elaborately quantified, with financial and pricing arrangements factored in.

Indeed, one may link most disastrous marketing decisions to the decline of intuitive reasoning, as statistical reasoning takes its place. The manager who knows in his gut, from experience, what might work and what won’t, or can’t, is displaced by the young analyst with computer modelling skills and all the jargon of “science” to express the platitudes he was drip-fed in school.

But here, too, “private” and “public” enterprise are fully integrated. Both are adapted to the “planning” paradigm, and each is utterly dependent on the other, in what is misleadingly called “the mixed economy.” The critics of abstract Capitalism, on the one side, and abstract Socialism, on the other, draw a false contrast between two administrative orders, when they are both bureaucratic in nature, inhumanly oversized, and habitually dedicated to the pursuit of monopoly.

Several of the readers with whom I correspond are under the immovable impression that I am against making money, or improvements in technology, per se. In fact my outlook is cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic. The moral questions are instead such as, How is the money made? And, for what are the improvements to be used? As I must remind e.g. my Chief Texas Correspondent, I am not against electricity or indoor plumbing. But I am against worshipping such things, or making them the criteria for high civilization.

March 3, 2019

Fake News in the Radio Age | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 1 of 2

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 28 Feb 2019

Modernization caused a communication revolution in the 1920’s with the mass adaptation of the radio, with all sorts consequences for the entertainment industry as well as the political game.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

1919 Between Two Wars Episodes on post war technology: https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&vide…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson

Credits for this episode: Bundesarchive | Old Time Radio Researchers Group | Library of Congress

Colorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina and Norman Stewart
Thumbnail by Klimbim/Olga Shirnina: https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com
Norman’s pictures https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

February 23, 2019

QotD: “Toxic masculinity”

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

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 5, 2019

The looming threat of agents plotting to influence the next federal election

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Coyne has the details:

I have an urgent warning for the people of Canada. Even now, certain agents are plotting to influence the result of the next election campaign by means of stealth and deception.

Posing as ordinary Canadians, they plan to use social media to spread falsehoods designed to inflame public opinion, using the latest micro-targeting technologies to tailor their messages to the reader’s particular fears and prejudices.

These agents are better known as the political parties.

One of the problems with the Liberal government’s recently announced plan to “defend Canadian democracy” from foreign interference, notably in the form of “fake news,” is the basic premise: that the principal threat to the integrity of the Canadian electoral process is posed by outsiders, third parties and foreign agents, rather than the participants.

If there is something ominous about the government involving itself, however indirectly, in deciding what is and is not fake news, there is something quite ludicrous about a political party raising the alarm over the spreading of falsehoods during an election campaign. Indeed, a good short definition of an election campaign would be “a sustained, intense, all-party burst of falsehood, slander and misrepresentation.”

There isn’t a lot else. A modern campaign consists mostly in what is gently termed “defining” opposing party leaders, in a way calculated to make them unrecognizable to their own mothers. The rest is devoted to deliberately misrepresenting the other parties’ positions, while making false or exaggerated claims about their own.

There remains a gentlemanly expectation that these falsehoods should not be obviously detectable as such — that is, that the lie should itself be artfully concealed, disguised as an elision, half-truth or what a Liberal MP recently called “rhetorical advantage,” rather than rubbed in the public’s faces in the manner pioneered by Donald Trump.

January 27, 2019

Modern advertising – “wokeness … for millennials, is basically Corinthian leather for the soul”

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

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 2, 2019

In violation of Betteridge’s law of headlines, this question can clearly be answered “yes!”

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

A few days back, Ted Campbell posted under the title “Is it time to get rid of the CBC? Should we?” Betteridge’s law says the answer should be “no”, but in this case the answer is more like “Why haven’t we sold that thing off already?”:

OK, the source of this cringeworthy video clip, Rebel Media, may be suspect to many ~ I do not follow them ~ but it does bring up a question: is this what we expect for the $1 Billion plus we pay for the CBC?

The complete interview, which I watched. looks, as someone else said, more like an advertisement for one of those online dating sites than news. It certainly caused a small storm about the CBC’s bias … which, in this case, especially when compared to CBC journalists’ question and comments directed to e.g. Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, seems over the top, even by the CBC’s standards. And that begs the question: is the CBC living up to its mandate? The Broadcasting Act says (§3(1)(d)(i), inter alia, that “The Canadian broadcasting system should serve to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada.” I suspect that someone will want to make a case that the CBC, as a network, at least in it’s English language ‘news’ services, has crossed a line and looks too much like a 24 hour a day informercial for the Laurentian Consensus as represented by the Liberal Party of Canada.

[…]

What does the CBC do? Basically it provides, in both English and French, three services:

  • Radio Canada International ~ this is Canada’s voice to the world, it is, today, entirely on the internet. In 2012 the Harper government imposed a 10% cut on CBC/Radio Canada ~ then CBC/Radio Canada decide that RCI, which is little known, would have its budget cut by 80% from $12+ Million to just over $2 Million. That ended the era of RCI‘s shortwave, world wide service. It was a criminally stupid decision that, in my considered, professional opinion, should have caused the government of the day to summarily dismiss the entire CBC/Radio Canada Board and all of the most senior managers for cause. Every country needs a “voice,” RCI was ours … the gold standard for international broadcasting is found in the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle, both still provides near global coverage using nearly jam-proof shortwave and satellite radio stations. Both, of course, make extensive and intensive use of the internet;
  • CBC Radio ~ CBC Radio has a big, integrated network of stations covering most of Canada. You can see a list of transmitters on their web site. If you live in Arctic Bay, in Nunavut, population 850±, you are served by radio station CKAB-FM which is a community-owned CBC North rebroadcaster that gets its programming from CFFB in Iqaluit; if you live in Prince Rupert, BC, your are served by CBC Radio 1 (a national network which has a mix of local, regonal and national programmes) broadcasting on 860 KHz and if you live in Shilo, MB you are also served by CBC Radio 1 on FM from Brandon, the people in Twillingate, NL are served, again by Radio 1 from Grand Falls which is rebroadcast on 90.7 MHz from a transmitter in Botswood. In short, CBC Radio is doing a first rate job of serving most Canadians, even if you find some of the content banal and biased. I think it is, by and large, money well spent because in many, many, many communities the CBC provides the only news and weather; but
  • CBC Television is, in my opinion, a near total waste of taxpayer’s money. As you can see from this list (you have to select the province you want) the CBC has only 14 English language TV broadcast stations which serve about 25 urban ‘markets’ and serves less than 10% of the Canadian market in prime time. (Rex Murphy, in a talk to the Manning Centre, quipped about the low audience levels of the CBC at about the 2’50” mark.) It used to have hundreds of transmitters providing near national coverage but in 2012, when Canada converted to digital TV, it closed all but 14 because only a tiny number (certainly less than 5%, likely less than 2%) of Canadians want to watch CBC and do not have cable or internet access. Electing to not serve Canadians with many, many local TV stations was a smart business decision because, as you can see from this listing, Canadians from Kamloops, through Kenora and on to Halifax and St. John’s are served by other networks.

I think that Radio Canada International should be upgraded; CBC Radio should remain about the same, government funded and commercial free, and CBC TV should be closed, completely and the money saved should be used to directly subsidize TV, film and radio production in Canada based on Canadian content rules: n% for the production company being Canadians and using Canadian studios, x% for using Canadian talent ~ on screen and in in the studio, y% for using Canadian locations and so on.

Some, at least half, I suspect, of the CBC’s 14 television licences will sell, at auction, for a tidy sum, making room for new, innovative, probably ethnic, services in larger cities ~ Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal and a couple of others. The CBC”s excellent production facilities will also sell for a good sum to private entrepreneurs who will then host dozens of independent radio and TV programme producers. There’s nothing wrong with Canadian production values and in a more open market I suspect that Canadian drama, public affairs, education and political commentary programmes can survive and even thrive, each on its own merits.

October 16, 2018

QotD: I’m All Right Jack

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

I’m All Right Jack is a film delicately poised between two very different cultural moments. The opening scene looks back to the war, the heyday of collective endeavour and national solidarity, but the song — both in content and style — seems to look forward to a new era of aggressive hedonism and unashamed self-interest.

At the time, though, what attracted most attention was Peter Sellers’s hilarious performance as the obstreperous trade unionist Fred Kite (“We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal”), which delighted many cinemagoers and won him a BAFTA. Not surprisingly, it went down very badly with union leaders and left-wing reviewers, but the Boultings were unrepentant. In an article for the Daily Express, they explained their reasoning:

    As individuals we believe in Britain because Britain has always stood for the individual.

    Nowadays there seem to be two sacred cows — Big Business and Organized Labour. Both are deep in a conspiracy against the individual — to force us to accept certain things for what in fact they are not. Both are busy feathering their nests most of the time. And to hell with the rest of us…

    AFter all, who is King in the Welfare State? That humourless, faceless monster — the official, the bureaucrat, the combine executive.

    Certainly a great deal has changed since we used to be Angry Men before the war … But at the end of this huge revolution we are not so sure that the losses have not been as great as the gains.

    For example, the tendency to think of people not as human beings but as part of a group, a bloc, a class.

The Boultings knew, of course, that this would annoy some poeple. But the great strength of the “average Briton”, they insisted, lay in “laughing at his leaders and institutions. We believe our films reflect the popular attitude and mood. Their success seems to prove our point.”

Since I’m All Right Jack is in black and white, it is easy to forget how bracingly modern it must have seemed, not just to the Queen and Harold Macmillan, but to the large audiences who flocked to see it in the autumn of 1959. It was released only ten years after Passport to Pimlico, but the difference in mood and tone can hardly be exaggerated. It is not just a question of colletivism versus individualism, but the social context that those two ideas reflected. The Ealing film was made against a background of austerity; the Boultings’ film is drenched in consumerism. In the early scenes of Passport to Pimlico, we find ourselves in a world of rationing and restrictions, bomb damage and dereliction. What kicks off the action, in fact, is the accidental detonation of an unexploded German bomb. But I’m All Right Jack is set in the late 1950s, a world awash with appliances and advertising, in which wartime austerity is merely a fading memory. The narrator tells us that at long last “industry, spurred by the march of science in all directions, was working at high pressure to supply those viatl needs for which the people had hungered for so long”. But when Ian Carmichael’s blundering hero gets a job in industrial management, he soon finds out what these “vital needs” are: Num-Yum chocolate bars and Detto washing powder, each with its own irritatingly catchy jingle.

Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of our National Imagination, 2015.

October 5, 2018

When the marketing department took over tool sales

Filed under: Business, Tools — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Paul Sellers was standing in line at one of his local big box store (in my part of North America, it’d be a Home Depot or Lowes), and he happened to glance at some of the packaging for otherwise pretty ordinary tools:

I’m never sure when it started, a point where you could no longer determine what something is by its name. A form of sensationalism was somehow loosed and we lost sincerity to titles declaring ‘not ordinary’ that hid what was, when all said and done, intrinsically quite the ordinary. All the handsaw makers followed suit latterly with model names like piranha, sabretooth and barracuda. Then they backed up claims with reference terms such as, “Using a handsaw impacts on all the muscles and joints in your arm. The ERGO™ handle is designed with users, tasks and environments in mind to make the job…” blah, blah, blah! The truth is that saw makers of the 18th century put far more effort into the development of ergonomic design of saw handles than any modern maker and all modern makers either copied what existed or dumbed down the designs to come up with the most basic one-size fits all design.

Photo by Paul Sellers

In reality of course nothing’s really changed except that the handles are pre moulded plastic and the teeth cannot be sharpened any more. I was in my local builders merchants waiting to pay and stood staring at the signage of the two nearest products facing me. Whereas these stab saws and jab saws convey a sense of brutalising aggression, it’s the marketer that suggests that this is what the buyer needs. Aggressive marketers think that that is indeed what the user wants, a kind of macho-man aggression to his work. The packaging has changed to use brighter hi-viz lines, letters and numbers with rip tares and wild hogs with tusks as the marketers way of connecting the would-be user to a sale of his products. Imagine, even a common degreasing agent remains the same as it was ten years ago is packed and wrapped with a punchy headline header, “Cleans like crazy!”, too, but why the wild ‘Mad Hog’ title replete with tusks? Reminds me of the Arkansas Razorback football team. What they don’t probably realise is that they would have sold as well without it. I guess they thought that they had that insider knowledge of what the trades people needed, right?

My suspicion is that there are really two distinct markets for tools and tool-related products like these. The first, and more stable market is the trades, where the demand is probably pretty steady and unlikely to shift much no matter what the marketers put on the packages. Tradespeople generally like to use known brands that they can depend on for consistent value at a given price point. These folks aren’t the target for all the marketing flash and bumf — they’ll keep buying the “Old Reliable™” brand until/unless they sell the brand to a cheaper manufacturer and the quality of the end product starts to slip. The target instead is … you. You, the non-regular user of “jab saws” or “stab saws” or even degreasing agents. You probably don’t have much recent experience with any of the current brands of tools, so you’re significantly more likely to be swayed by how the tools and materials are marketed. You’re the sucker who (they hope) will fall for the bright colours, eye-catching packaging, and mucho-macho descriptions.

And they wouldn’t keep doing it if it didn’t work.

May 27, 2018

The Decreasing Viability of YouTube as a Platform for Independent Creators

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

Computing Forever
Published on 25 May 2018

April 15, 2018

Facebook is stalking you, even if you don’t have an account

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

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gennie Gebhart and Jamie Williams explain why Facebook doesn’t need to listen in on your microphone to serve you with creepy ads:

In ten total hours of testimony in front of the Senate and the House this week, Mark Zuckerberg was able to produce only one seemingly straightforward, privacy-protective answer. When Sen. Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them ads, Zuckerberg confidently said, “No.”

What he left out, however, is that Facebook doesn’t listen to users through their phone microphones because it doesn’t have to. Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same.

This was what finally got Elizabeth to close her Facebook account: very shortly after posting a status update that referenced a particular business (that’s been gone for decades), she started getting ads for modern equivalents outside her Facebook session. Clearly, her advertising profile had been updated to include her “new” interest, and the ads were now tailored to this sudden change of tastes.

But how does Facebook know to serve you an ad for a specific product right after you talk about it? What explains seeing ads for things you have never searched for or communicated about online? The list is long. Instead of listening to your conversations through your phone, Facebook:

  • tracks you through Like buttons across the web, whether or not you are logged in or even have a Facebook account.
  • maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
  • logs Android users’ calls and texts.
  • absorbs unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
  • tracks your location and serves ads based on where you are, where you live, and where you work.
  • tracks your in-store purchases to link the ads you see online with the purchases you make offline.
  • watches the things you start writing but don’t post to track your self-censorship.
  • linked purchases to Messenger accounts to allow sellers to send confirmation messages without affirmative user permission.
  • bought and advertised a VPN to track what users are doing on other apps and crush competition.
  • manipulated your Newsfeed to see if it can make you sad or happy.
  • files patents for emerging tracking technology, like tracking your location through the dust on your phone camera, for potential future use.

Tracking and analysis methods like these power not only those too on-the-nose ads, but also invasive “People You May Know” recommendations.

Users are onto this. If you have ever been creeped out by an ad for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, your fear and even paranoia are warranted — just not for the exact reasons you might think. No matter how Facebook achieves its frighteningly accurate ads and suggestions, the end result is the same: an uncomfortable, privacy-invasive user experience.

I’m getting closer to the point of pulling the plug on my Facebook account as well … it seems like every week or so I need to go spelunking in the privacy settings to shut off yet another way they want to monetize my information or invade my privacy even more. Several of my FB friends are dabbling with MeWe.com as an alternative and they do claim not to track you or otherwise compromise your privacy.

March 30, 2018

New Firefox extension to reduce Facebook‘s default tracking

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

If you use Firefox as your primary browser, you might be interested in a new Firefox extension that limits how Facebook tracks your activity:

Mozilla Firefox has a new extension to prevent Facebook from tracking your online habits.

Capitalizing on the fears surrounding Facebook privacy, Mozilla has designed the “Facebook Container,” a Firefox add-on that blocks Facebook from tracking users when they click on ads or links that take them off the site.

Facebook currently uses a program called Pixel to collect information on how users engage with the site. When users click on links, they visit external sites but are still logged in to Facebook‘s platform. These outside sites will contain “share” or “like” buttons, and when users engage with these functions, this activity is connected to their Facebook identity. That’s how Facebook is able to fine-tune its advertisements to its users. While this is a well-known practice, many aren’t aware that their behaviors outside the core function of Facebook are tracked.

But when people using Facebook Container click a link on Facebook, it loads in a seperate blue tab that isolates users’ activities from the core site. In these blue tabs, users will not be logged into Facebook, which prevents further data collection. Users do have the option to continue to use the “share” and “like” buttons, but Mozilla notes that these activities may still be tracked. The extension doesn’t prevent data collection, but it offers users more control over their privacy.

It may only be a token toward reclaiming a tiny bit of your online privacy, but even tokens can be valuable in the aggregate.

March 22, 2018

QotD: “Sustainability”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Food, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Today on the radio I heard an ad for a DC-area supermarket chain that boasts that it now has on sale – as in, selling for a reduced price – “sustainably farmed fish.”

I really dislike the word “sustainable” (and all of its variations) as used today to signal holier-than-thou environmental ‘awareness.’ As Robert Solow said about this concept,

    It is very hard to be against sustainability. In fact, the less you know about it, the better it sounds.

But advertising “sustainably farmed fish” – implying, as it does (rather bizarrely), that unsustainably farmed fish are common – is especially annoying. While the absence of property rights in oceans and other large bodies of water, and in uncaught fish, might well lead to overfishing (that is, to a genuinely unsustainable manner of acquiring fish for human consumption), the very essence of a fish farm implies property rights in the fish stocks. And where there are property rights there is sustainability. A fish farmer is no more likely to allow his stock of fish to be depleted than is the owner of Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh to allow his horse to be slaughtered for sport, or than are you to allow the cost of motor oil to prevent you from ever changing the oil in your car.

[…]

It’s depressing that those people who today are most likely to worry about resources being “unsustainable” – people who are most likely to prattle publicly about “sustainability” – are those people who also are most likely to disparage private property rights and to argue for government policies that weaken and attenuate such rights. Such people are those who are most likely to wish to further collectivize the provision not only of environmental amenities such as park space and animal conservation, but also of health care, of education, of housing, and of a host of other private goods and services. Such people also are those who are most likely to protest prices made higher by market forces, and to applaud rent-control and other government-imposed price ceilings on a variety of consumer goods and services.

In short, the people who today howl most frequently and loudly for “sustainability” are those who most frequently and loudly oppose the legal and economic institutions – private property and market-determined prices – that alone reliably promote genuine sustainability.

Don Boudreaux, “‘Sustainability’ is Fishy”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-26.

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