Category: Thoughts

In which Aaron gets dragged into conservative media

After links from both Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan, I left the confines of my usual filter bubble and read a piece in (lord help me) the National Review, about poverty in Kentucky, and commentary on it in The American Conservative.

And if I’m looking for thoughtful writing with which I disagree, those are reasonable places to find it. More so than, say, RedState, which I won’t even link to.

The article overall is worth reading and wrestling with, and it brings up problems in both right- and left-wing solutions to the serious problems of rural poverty.

Still, none of the blogs I’ve read on the article, and none of the (often thoughtful, generally well-moderated) comment threads, noted this throwaway line:

Kentucky is No. 19 in the ranking of states by teen pregnancy rates, but it is No. 8 when it comes to teen birth rates, according to the Guttmacher Institute, its young women being somewhat less savage than most of their counterparts across the country.

I’m sorry, did you just call the women of the more prosperous portions of the nation savages? Because they are willing and able to control their fertility in a variety of ways?

Poverty indeed.

Elsewhere

I’ve been reviewing a number of books over at Bookdwarf.com. Most recently I talked up my friend Patrick’s impressions of BMW-enthusiast mechanical guide/memoir Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. Somewhat earlier, I read about the nexus of sugar, slaves, and industrialization in Sweetness and Power and was fascinated by a revealing take on ocean shipping in 90 Percent of Everything.

Arbitrage Opportunity Alert

Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that the editors and writers from the National Review (no, i won’t link to it) think that young black men are likely to be criminals. This sounds like an opportunity for middle-aged white women to rob them blind. THEY WILL NEVER SUSPECT A THING. IT’S THE PERFECT CRIME.

Wait, is this basically the plot of The Bling Ring? In which case, never mind.

Anil Dash is pretty clever

Anil Dash has a list of 10 internet laws that seem pretty accurate.

They all have exceptions, of course. Like Rule 8: When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.

Sometimes technological disruption is perfectly legit, and sometimes it’s actually undermining good things. And sometimes it’s both: Unlicensed amateur taxi drivers are not a great idea, but taxi commissions are also corrupt and unhelpful…

I’m not sure where that leads. But the list is definitely a good lens for thinking about business and marketing these days (and probably in the past as well, in most cases).

Marketing’s enthusiast problem

When you think motorcycle rider, you might think of a dentist on a big Harley cruising around on the weekends. But your average motorcyclists live in India or Southeast Asia and have a 250cc or smaller motorbike as the primary transportation for their household. The American motorcycle market consists almost entirely of enthusiasts, and they’re visible. But manufacturers, if they want to sell anything in volume, need to keep the meat of the market in their sights.

Automakers have a similar enthusiast problem: Their most dedicated fans are not, in fact, their best customers. And focusing on their most enthusiastic customers can lead them into serious trouble.

Honda, for a while, wanted to be the cool car company. So they made some cool cars, and they courted the aftermarket tuner crowd. The next thing you know, their brand was tainted by things like this:

Your typical driver is not a car enthusiast. Your typical driver has an appliance that takes them places. Jalopnik and the other car media may hate beige, but the enthusiasts are merely the most vocal segment of the market. If the average driver buys a car magazine, it’s the Consumer Reports car issue. And they only buy that when they’re in the market for a new car.

When you look for the enthusiast problem, you see it everywhere. Home electronics, video games, PCs, you name it. The enthusiast audience thinks it’s the real audience. In many cases, the industry leaders are enthusiasts themselves – that’s why they went into the industry, after all. But that means they often fail to understand that their audience doesn’t love their products the same way they do.

The average college student is not a 19-year-old fraternity brother. The average video-game player is not playing FPS games on a console and drinking Mountain Dew. The average car-buyer is not looking for an engaging drive. The average PC buyer is not actually chasing clock speed.

Obviously, you need to know your customers. And when you think you really understand them, you’re probably wrong.

Grad School

I think that what I really object to is the way everyone always elides the intractable disconnect between credentialing and education. I don’t want to go to grad school just to check a box, and I have a hard time seeing any actual advantage to spending 3-4 years grinding through a series of online lectures about IT supply chain management, aside from that shiny piece of parchment.

I feel like one of those gold bugs who refuses to comprehend that money doesn’t have to actually be a physical object of permanent value, and instead dives into conspiracy theories about how fractional-reserve banking and the Fed are systematic theft machines. I refuse to accept that cultural capital is actually just whatever we say it is. I really want a degree to have a real and relevant value, and not just be a way to keep out the rabble and network Our Sort of People.

Vocabulary: Spimes and… Something Else

So, according to Wikipedia, a spime is an object that can be tracked through its entire life cycle, through space and time, hence the portmanteau.

But I’m looking for a somewhat different word. A physical object which is, in fact, only the representation of a digital object. Say, if I have a document on Google Docs or Sharepoint or my hard drive, and print it out. I might scribble all over that sheet of paper, but the original is the digital version. And the changes I make to the paper version only become real if I make them in the digital version. The physical printout of the object is disposable; the digital original is the (more) permanent one.

I might make a piece of music on my laptop and then print it as an LP and take it to a house party and put it on a turntable. The LP is an instance of the original object.

For a dissection of the confusion this creates in a world that also demands a hardcopy for authenticity and archiving, see