Bookshelf: Louis Vuitton’s bookcase trunk

Bookshelf: Louis Vuitton’s bookcase trunk

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Al Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where Gore Failed - NYTimes.com

Al Jazeera Seeks a U.S. Voice Where Gore Failed - NYTimes.com:

Current, similarly, has suffered from paltry ratings. “Nobody’s watching,” one of the channel’s prime-time hosts, Eliot Spitzer, quipped to a reporter last month.

It's buried in the God-only-knows hinterlands of the cable directory, AND requires a special subscription package. No wonder. It was one of people's best outlets for neat content for a while. Current's website broke dozens of talented news producers.

Wiley Online: Using subtle reminders of love to foster healthy snack choices

Using subtle reminders of love to foster healthy snack choices - Raska - 2012 - Journal of Consumer Behaviour - Wiley Online Library:

Results from the studies suggest that exposure to subtle reminders of companionate love lead to a greater likelihood of making healthy eating choices than subtle reminders of sexual love.

That's a really interesting revelation. Instead of "Carrots make you sexy!", think "Eating carrots makes people want to hang out with you!"

Tangentially related:

Association of Nutrient-Dense Snack Combinations With Calories and Vegetable Intake

 Children consumed 72% fewer calories when eating a combined snack compared with when they were served potato chips, P < .001. Children who ate the combination snack needed significantly fewer calories to achieve satiety than those who ate potato chips, P < .001. The effects of the snack conditions on caloric intake were more pronounced among overweight or obese children (P = .02) and those from low-involvement families (P = .049)

 Eat some veggies and a bit of cheese. With friends.

Autism and Organic Foods

A math geek on Reddit published this amazing graph:

It shows a perfect correlation between organic food sales and autism diagnosis.

Just let this sink in for a moment.

....

Nobody is claiming organic food causes autism, but that they track so perfectly means there's some relationship...

Consider how autism diagnoses tend to cluster. In wealthy zip codes.

There's a dense set of elements here: economic wealth (equals leisure time and 'lifestyle' resources), in addition to creating incentives for 'good parenting', allows parents to dedicate more attention to their children. "Good parents" will buy organic foods believing these are the best choices for their families (marketing works!) and take their children to the doctor at the first sign of any problems.

All of these elements conspire to create the following reality: rich people are unable to think of themselves as substandard. This makes a kind of sense given the daily reinforcements the rich receive (constant social deference, more free services, etc), but it has terrible consequences when it comes to the critical life skill of self-assessement. I think these parents place unreasonable expectations on their children, who inevitably fail to live up to them, who are then 'diagnosed' with 'autism.' This gives great comfort to a Good Parent: they've done the Right Thing by bringing their concerns to a doctor, and now they have a perfectly reasonable, natural, authoritative answer to why their child isn't perfect: Autism.

See? They're not bad parents after all, in fact, quite the opposite. They've done everything right: Nature gave them an imperfect child.

I'm sure there are plenty of autism diagnosis that are genuine, however, I am also certain these socio-economic clusters exist for more superficial reasons.

Why is this important? Because this segment of society is politically powerful enough to command limited public resources for themselves at the detriment of the commons. This nation has an established tradition of building political realities upon the firmament of denial.

Random Thursday Thoughts #4

I've been thinking about luxury brands in the context of an economic phenomenon called "Akerlof's Quality Trap." How do luxury brands persist? Marketing is one answer, but is it the only one?

Is a Mercedes-Benz really a better car? Are Michelin tires of any better quality than Kelly or Roadhawk?

There's a neat anecdote in the book "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster" about a high-end dress manufacturer's experience with different cultural systems of determining quality/value. In the book, Thomas describes a dress with a 'flaw' - a single stray thread is visible on the bottom seam. In Japan, a typical customer won't purchase the jacket, seeing the thread as an indicator of the garment's overall quality. A French customer, by contrast, will see the thread but think "That's fixable!" and still consider the dress. An American won't even notice.

This may have to do with a thinning population of tradespeople (and affiliated knowledge transfers) in the U.S. If one is unable to determine whether or not a product is made with the best available or  cheapest materials, then one is at the unfortunate end of an information asymmetry. Being that practically all retail activity is predicated on this arrangement, it's easy to see how capitalist societies will tend toward lower-quality (read; higher-cost) products as the market will capitulate to economic pressure.

This has had some personal relevance lately as I've been subjected to the depressing process of obtaining service on an automobile. With little/no information about the engineering, manufacture, etc of my car, and no reasonable way to obtain that data in the first place, I am at the mercy of a mechanic/dealer who have competing economic incentives. I want my car fixed at a reasonable cost - the dealer wants as much profit as he can create - he has a strong incentive to oversell services and under-repair the car.

The presence of these incentives in and of themselves is not the revelation - that they lead to a situation in which it is impossible for the dealer/mechanic to provide "quality" parts or services because there's not a consensual means of determining good vs. not-good.

If economics are going to be the tools by which value (and cash) are extracted from us, then they are also the tools of (literal) accountability. From this perspective, one solution may be political: the altering of Lemon Laws to consider a lifetime cost of repairs vs. 'market value.' In my equation, "market value" is the sum a dealer is willing to pay on a trade in (the best indicator of a vehicle's cash value, IMHO.) In other words, if the cost of maintenance exceeds what the dealer themselves are willing to pay for the car under a trade-in, the vehicle is a "lemon" and can be returned to the manufacturer. Crazy? Stupid?

Returning to the idea of a kind of market paralysis, I want to talk about music, because I think we have very analogous situation. The buyer of a ticket, for example, does not know beforehand whether the show will be a "cherry" or a "lemon". So the buyer's best guess for a given band/show is that the act is of average quality; accordingly, he/she will be willing to pay for it only the price of a act of known average quality. This means that the manager of a solid act will be unable to get a high enough price to make selling that act worthwhile. Therefore, the most talented will not place their wares in the market. The withdrawal of music talent reduces the average quality of bands on the market, causing buyers to revise downward their expectations for any given act. This, in turn, motivates the moderately good not to perform, and so on.

It's not a perfect analogy. The point about diminishing expectations driving out not only talent but the possibility for it at all cannot be understated.

Temperance, Security Theater, and the Cult of Identification

A few ideas only tangentially connected.

Here in California it is impossible to have a cocktail without first showing a state-issued identification.

But you can buy weed off your kids.

The main reason California engages in this temperance nonsense has to do with MADD and their incessant meddling with laws, specifically the gutting of former protections (think 4th and 5th Amendments.)

A regulatory structure has been implemented that motivates purveyors of alcohol to 'check' the identity of every single patron (aka a 'dragnet'). This is little more than socialized surveillance as security theater.

The vast majority of retailers/clerks are unable to verify a physical ID in any real way, so what they're really doing is an act of theater to fulfill a legal/insurance requirement. If my 60 year old mom gets ID'd for a bottle of wine....

So if the legal threshold is a physical act (patron holds up plastic, server nods approvingly), then its an easy line to draw to theater and meaninglessness. The proprietor's only interest is "CYA", so no ID's (or ages) are being verified. They couldn't be.

But the Cult of ID says otherwise. For some reason, we believe the 20-year old kid with a nametag has somehow mastered the art of identity verification (as if there were such an art in the first place.) I think its subconsciously comforting that we're participating in some kind of verification of ourselves, but odd given the reality that waitstaff does no such thing.

So why does this persist?

Because we are a magical people, who believe in magical things.

Thursday's Random Thoughts

Cultural Archiving and Thermal Limits.

We're keeping too much stuff online. With every photo you upload to Instagram, every blog post about global warming or every web-video appeal, a piece of glacier disappears.

That's the connection we need to make. Talking about cars or industry (the pollution we can 'see') allows us to project participation in 'the problem' on others.

Is it possible one's internet usage can use as much energy as owning an automobile? (has anyone done this math?)

Well, yes. From a recent NYT article:

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town." 

Emphasis mine.

That's 30 nuke plants today. What of next year? Moore's law says we're going to keep storing even more data, so we're going to be pulling even more energy off the grid.

How do we stem the pace of global warming AND keep our blogs?

Short of denial (who's power I won't underestimate), something's got to be done.

Someone has to pay.

I don't know enough about carbon offsets to know if they'll address this because they seem (in my current understanding) targeted at energy producers and not energy consumers. Am I wrong about that?

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Point-of-Sale Systems and Time Taxes

I call it "Prompt Creep." It's a spin on the concept of "Feature Creep" - the idea that systems will tend toward complexity. Practically every POS system I come across now prompts me for:

• a "customer loyalty" or "club" or some other membership card or identification
• whether I prefer a credit or debit transaction. My choice has some consequence, as it can be a net gain or loss for the vendor (who I may be wishing to support) depending on the relationship they have with their own bank.
• I am prompted for a PIN or signature
• I am asked if I want any cash back (every cash register is an ATM, too!)
• Prompted for a donation (at many grocery stores)
• Prompted for receipt options
• Printed Reciept
• Email 
• Txt Message
• If you select this option, you are prompted to sign up for a store membership and accept advertising (ahem, "PROMOTIONAL") messages sent to your mobile device
• No Receipt (???)
• Finally prompted to confirm the total (do I carry a calculator with me?)

This part of a commercial transaction is downright inhuman. As a customer, I have to focus my attention on a keypad and screen (I'm not acknowleging another human being) and the clerk has to focus on their screen. If there is a line, there is added pressure to make the transaction occur as hurriedly as possible.

So all of these prompts, the pressure of a building line, and the last (and arguably MOST stressful part of a POS experience) is the waiting for "APPROVAL". The actual system of ATM/Credit is voodoo to most people, but the neurological effects of shame and embarrassment when one's transaction reads "DECLINED" are very, very real. That few seconds of waiting... "Am I about to experience public shame and embarassment?" causes a momentary elevation of adrenalin.

(read Google Scholar articles on "effects of adrenaline neural memory")

Of the contributing factors to this stress is the combination of decision fatigue and a sense of frustration related to the sense you're time is not being respected. Instead, you and I are being both figuratively and literally, taxed.

So why not use cash?

I want to do more thinking on this, but I have a sense about a collision of a few forces: a cultural association between cash and criminal activity, an economy where many single items can exceed common denominations, that most cash dispensing systems use only $20 bills, when $5's are much more useful (creating a problem for vendors when they run out of smaller bills for change).

That's a dense set of elements.  And while it may seem trivial at an individual level, every time you prompt someone, you're adding as many as five seconds to the transaction. Scaled over just one local grocery operation (250k customers daily) that's a lot of people standing in line (lost productivity = regressive tax).

Thursday's Random Thoughts

Facebook's new "Promote This" feature:
"Traditional" business interests are reacting to Facebook's new promotional opportunities as if its a death knell (see: Mark Cuban, Mavericks). The assumption implicit in their thinking is they should have a monopoly on speech.

I don't know how long Facebook's new thing will last, but opening up the ability for anyone to "promote" a post for a few bucks (or a lot, depending) kind of changes the degree of access. It's not really revolutionary, but it is slightly more democratic (easy, one-click access).

In the next election cycle, proponents will mobilize their own voices more directly by sponsoring their own (or candidate's) posts. Facebook will make a lot of money.
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This is the best summary of the media frenzy over Gen Patreus having a personal life.
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Hotels are hiding fees in your bill to suck a few extra bucks from your wallet. 
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Voters raised taxes all over the country.
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John Gordon at Kateva on the connection between corporate structure and Soviet-style central planning:

Central planning triumphs because, even if we ignore regulatory capture and senatorial acquisition, corporations are only capitalist on the outside of the cell membrane. Inside the corporation there are no contracts, no currencies, and no markets. Inside the corporation, we have the hallmarks of Soviet central planning - goals and quotas and commissars and imaginary numbers and dictates from the central commission.

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I was wrong about Prop 37 passing by a wide margin. Marion thinks this speaks to the power of money in political advertising, but I'm not so sure. The big money was right on this one, but for different reasons. I still thing GMO labeling is coming, but it will be in a more marketable form. Look to the DeBeers Diamonds model (use long-term marketing to create a perception that GMO is a premium product.)
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John Gordon (again!) predicts the demise of climate change as a party platform in GOP politics within the year. Do you agree?
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How corporations use rent-seeking to extract value from economic activities they don't support:

Here's another good example that affects Internet policy. We hear a lot about "free content" on the Web, and the idea that users are getting something for nothing. "They don't want to pay for their content." And yet, most people access the Internet by paying an Internet service provider $60, $70, $80 a month. You think of a company like Comcast. The user pays them $80 a month and watches television, and we say, "Oh. They're paying for content." They pay $80 a month for access to the Internet and we say, "Oh. They're getting their content for free." Something is clearly wrong with that picture!

In fact, the reverse is actually true. The free rider is Comcast. If people watch television, the Cable company has to pay money downstream to content providers. When people watch YouTube, or use Facebook or Twitter, or just surf the Web, they pay nothing for content. So it's not users who are getting the free ride, it's these big companies. That's just one of many implications that come to light when you start thinking about the Clothesline Paradox.

What are you thinking about today?

Thursday Thoughts

 Random Thoughts on a Thursday:

Why do all the good ideas happen in the shower? My hypothesis: it has something to do with neural stimulation via water hitting the skin. That and your psychological guard is down.

The view that tablets (particularly iPads) represent a 'next generation' of devices is a marketing framing that has become the dominant way of thinking. But I think tablets are still version 1.0 tech.
They are merely a convergence of two media approaches: print and video (it's a paper movie screen!) The most fundamental premise of the iPad's (and by proxy all tablets) design is that people are going to consume media on these devices. This is still tech 1.0 thinking. Tech 2.0 is all about data and analysis.

Musicians need to think about car sales, but not in the way we have been - we have to think about the lot size as analogous to an individual's available time. There's only so many cars (songs) you can
put on the lot. But what do you do with a massive oversupply of cars and customers that are still incredibly particular about what they want, and most cars are actually crap?

I want to know what the price of Coca-Cola says about a business's operating model.
Why is 64oz of Coke $0.99 at Circle K, but right next door at the ice cream shop, a "large" Coke is a $1.29 and contains roughly 10-12oz of soda (depending on the proportion of ice in the served beverage.)

The "Information wants to be free" founding ethos of the internet has scaled past relevance. It's only someone else's data that you want to be free - *yours* is worth a premium, right?

There is no such thing as "online anonymity" - your name/face and web history are all compiled at some corporate marketing headquarters. YouPorn and your bank use the same tech to track users - they know it's you.

Science and tech are taking a lot of the mystery out of the world, and so many people are afraid of the new mysteries. Most Americans need a refresher biology course in the worst way.

Everyone thinks the next president will be Republican Jeb Bush. I think it will be Schwarzenegger.

What are you thinking about today?