Open Mic for the week of 10/9/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Governor Newsom vetoed the caste discrimination bill, largely on the theory that existing law already covered it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/us/california-caste-discrimination.html
For what it’s worth, I agree that existing law covers it. If I were in the private sector, I would put my money where my mouth is and take a caste discrimination case on contingency. That said, though the bill was belt-and-suspendering, that wasn’t, in my view, sufficient reason to veto it. But the politics of it, singling out a type of discrimination only a small minority would even know how to do, is tricky, and I can’t blame the Governor for not wanting to piss them off for a purely symbolic reason.Report
I for one find it refreshing that the governor would veto a symbolic law of no apparent substantive value. It should happen more often and those that do it deserve credit.Report
Razib Khan did an interview with Sundar Iyer, who was the target of the original Cisco accusations and is alleging some pretty serious abuses by California’s Civil Rights Department.
He could be lying, I suppose, but the fact that they dropped the case gives him some credibility.Report
Since we have periodically revisited the plight of Bud Lite I thought I’d provide an anecdotal update, based on my experience of a place where lots of Bud Lite is usually drunk, that bring an MLB playoff game. I was at Camden Yards Saturday with my wife and 2 long time friends Sadly the O’s lost and are on the ropes for the series, but the future looks bright so I am trying not to be too sad about the game. Also Joan Jett sang the national anthem in her raspy rock star voice which we all agreed was pretty cool, and a fun change up from the usual pop styling or military band that is more usual.
Anyway, the lack of Bud Lite drinking was extremely noticeable. Budweiser remains a sponsor of the Baltimore Orioles, so Bud Lite was available and advertised everywhere, but the only time you saw people buying it was in the absence of alternatives. So for example, you’d see ice wells at the beer stands where one was set for Miller, and one was a combo of IPAs or miscellaneous other stuff, and they would be low or empty but a huge stuck of Bud Lites would remain. This was the same in the fridges, where there’s be an apparently untouched shelf of Bud Lites but dwindling supply of everything else. All of this is in an of course ultra blue city in an ultra blue state, but as best as I could tell no one was buying the blue bottles, except when they waited in line for beer and it was the only remaining beer.
I noted this to one of my friends who was with me, who is by OT standards very much a Normie.* He said he was vaguely aware of the controversy, and while he didn’t have a lot of opinions about the particulars of the boycott, he thought it was a positive thing that every once in a while people could still tell big companies to shove it, and not have no choice but to go along with anything they say. I thought it was an interesting perspective.
*Having heard of the situation he may not be a completely pure Normie. However I know he is not particularly online. Whenever politics come up he seems to lean non-partisan small-c conservative, but every now and again will express a sentiment well to the left of the Discourse, particularly on economic issues and national interests.Report
A friend of mine who works in the marketing/branding industry said that InBev/AB/Whatever has been on a slow downward slide due to a concerted effort to focus on short-term agains over long-term brand loyalty building. This incident was just another in a long line of such decisions that have been eating into their numbers. This one reflected this pattern on both a micro and macro level, as they chased the “Flavor of the Month” so-to-speak and it blew up in their face spectacularly. So rather than the partnership being a departure from how they’ve done things, it was actually another step on a path they’d been walking for a while, primarily since InBev made the acquisition.
So, the narrative that Bud Light was doing great and then completely cratered because they partnered with a trans person isn’t all that accurate. Rather, they’ve been losing marketshare and what not for a while because they kept prioritizing being hip and cool over building a loyal customer base. This was that on steroids.
Take that for whatever it’s worth…Report
Bud Light sales had been falling about 5% per year for a while. Then they fell 30% in a month. It’s hard to overestimate that loss.Report
At minimum I think there’s a straw that broke the camel’s back component.
In context of the game I was pondering how much of it might be the mindless ripple effect of not seeing blue bottles everywhere. There are definitely people consciously boycotting but the real damage could be taking it out of the chain of ordering what the person in front of you ordered, or just reflexively getting what everyone around you has. Maybe you cross some threshold where the herd perceives it as ‘not the thing’ without even considering the reason, almost like the people in Wall-E deciding to wear red. This is pure speculation of course.Report
Yeah, this isn’t a correlation is not cause argument.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/business/molson-coors-earnings/index.html
Bud Light’s decline is benefiting one of its biggest rivals.
Molson Coors, brewer of Miller Lite and Coors Light beers, reported Tuesday its single best quarter of revenue since its 2005 merger, as drinkers continue to shift their allegiance away from the Anheuser Busch-made beer.
In a release, Molson Coors (TAP) said that combined US sales of its two flagship beers outsold Bud Light by 50% in the second quarter and were 30% higher than Modelo Especial, which overtook Bud Light sales in May and June. That’s a drastic change from the same quarter a year ago, when Bud Light sales were higher than Coors Light and Miller Lite sales combined.Report
I’m not sure what you mean. I wasn’t replying so much to InMD but to Kazzy, who told a story that accounts for maybe 1/6 of the decline, and told it as if it refutes any other explanation. As for correlation and causation, the drop occurred during the month after the Mulvaney collab, and many people were saying that they were giving up Bud Light because of the collab. There were probably some people who stopped buying Bud Light because they weren’t sufficiently supportive of Mulvaney, and I’m sure there were people who didn’t buy it because they just wanted to avoid the argument. InMD is being reasonable speculating about the dynamics of the decline, but that being said, both theory and evidence point to a single major cause of the decline.Report
I’m not explaining his point well but part of it was that Bud Light (and all InBev-owned brands, to a degree) have been losing customer LOYALTY for a long time, because they have done little to cultivate loyalty.
There used to be guys my father worked with who wore shirts that said things like, “I’d rather push a Chevy then drive a Ford” and they meant it! Nowadays, consumers have preferences but unless brands work really hard to maintain brand loyalty, the preference is a flimsy one. AB used to do great brand development work but once InBev bought them, they stopped. Which is why supposedly fiercely loyal customers jumped ship because of a 30-second video most people never actually saw. It wasn’t that the video didn’t matter… it’s that it mattered as much as it did because the loyalty people felt towards Bud Light was so weak. I mean, if you truly loved something, would you start hating it because the marketing team made friends with someone you didn’t like?
THAT was his point… that this was the moment it was because of a long pattern of ignoring long-term brand loyalty. They were slowly losing customers and were ripe to lose a lot because most didn’t feel fiercely loyal to the brand. It was merely a preference and one they were fairly willing to change when a changed suited them.
He explained it much better. I hope this makes better sense than my first crack at it.Report
see you think you’re explaining why it wasn’t the ad campaign
but the thing is
you’re only explaining why it wasn’t only the ad campaignReport
Um, yea. It wasn’t JUST the ad campaign. That was my original point (albeit somewhat clumsily made).Report
Let’s talk about gamergate because why not?
Being told “you are no longer our target audience” is a good way to inspire someone to investigate alternatives.
There were a bunch of people who stopped going to various once-popular video gaming sites and those sites shut down, other sites pared back.
Same thing happened to comic books (you know that more manga is moved every week than DC/Marvel/Image? It’s true).
Heck, it happened with ESPN. Remember those years when you’d tune into ESPN and hear people yelling about Trump instead of women’s soccer?
And then ESPN said “you know what? We’re going to back off of politics and get back to talking about sports”. Believe it or not, people who didn’t even watch ESPN got pissy about this.
Anyway, if a business dedicated to personal enjoyment comes out and says “oh, but not you… you’re not my target audience”, you should expect people to up and leave and go somewhere else.
There’s a *LOT* of entertainments out there.
I am under *ZERO* obligation to keep purchasing your entertainment product. *NONE*.Report
Why does hiring a trans person say “You are not our target audience”?Report
They do comedy for brand awareness but this wasn’t that.
Their spokes-people are typically either hot women who we want to have sex with or men we want to be.
Which of those was this supposed to be?Report
You haven’t seen the interview with Alyssa Heinerscheid, I take it. It wasn’t just the hiring of Mulvaney (though it was also that).
It was the entire pivot on the part of marketing.
Here’s a link to what Alyssa Heinerscheid said in an interview. Watch it for yourself:
Listen to how she was talking about changing the campaign. She said that the brand had this fratty, out-of-touch thing going on and she wanted to evolve it. She wanted to no longer focus on the old audience but make an *INCLUSIVE* one that appealed to everybody.
My question is: Do you think that she succeeded in changing the tone of how Bud Light marketed itself?
If you are willing to believe that she was good enough at her job to communicate in her advertising what she said in the interview that she wanted to communicate… well, that’s how. “You were our target audience! But now… well, you’re merely *PART* of our target audience. The fratty, out-of-touch part.”
And a bunch of people responded by shrugging and changing brands.
Seriously, when’s the last time you tried a Bud Light?
I had one a couple of months ago and, lemme tell ya, I couldn’t tell the difference between Bud Light and Coors Light. I took a sip of Bud Light after eating some crackers and had to look at the can a second time because I was sure I made a mistake and took a sip from Coors Light twice in a row.
It’s not *THAT* good of a beer. It’s certainly not that unique of one.
It’s pretty fungible.
And people responded by being told “we’re going a new direction” by saying “we’re going a new direction”.
And they were under *ZERO* obligation to keep purchasing that entertainment product. *NONE*.Report
You tell me.
Imagine she were talking about a product you actually like.
Would this offend you, and cause you to not want to buy it?
Speaking for myself, the answer is “No”.Report
Yeah. I have essays about how Bioware responded to the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy and I never gave Bioware another cent after that.
They were my favorite game creators out there for years and years and then they responded to complaints by attacking critics and I shrugged and went elsewhere.
No shortage of games out there. I’d prefer to play games that cater to me, quite honestly. Only so many hours between work and chores and sleep and time with the wife, after all.Report
“She wanted to no longer focus on the old audience but make an *INCLUSIVE* one that appealed to everybody.”
You and I are saying the same thing.
That this was so offensive to some people they refused to do business with it.Report
No, I’m not saying the same thing as you are.
They went from targeting a particular group of people (the people who were buying their product) to targeting *EVERYONE*.
Report
Uh huh, and the boycotters refused to share a brand with EVERYONE.
Yes, we’re saying the same thing.Report
No, we’re not.
The boycotters said “Oh, if I’m not the target audience… then I’ll buy beer from someone who sees me as the target audience.”
Seriously, have you tried Bud Light in the last couple of days? You can get a can for a couple of bucks at the supermarket. Try one. Also get a can of Coors Light. See how different they are. See how much effort it would take to switch.
And we can get back to “seriously, there’s nothing wrong with changing entertainment products”.
And you can argue that there is. And I can argue that there isn’t.Report
So the boycotters don’t see the target audience called EVERYONE as containing them.
Are you sure we aren’t saying the same thing?
It sounds like we are.Report
They don’t see the target audience called “EVERYONE” as targeting them.
It used to target them.
Now it targets everyone.
You should watch that Incredibles clip. It’s short. Seriously. It won’t take up too much of your day.Report
I’m agreeing with you, unreservedly.
They saw the target audience as targeting them when it contained black people and Hispanic people and Asian people and soccer moms and doughy middle aged accountants and gay men and lesbians.
It was when the target was widened to include trans people they could no longer regard themselves as part of the targeted group.Report
Oh, good. I’m pleased you agree with me.
That’s something that I can agree with much more than “we’re saying the same thing!”Report
That this group of people refuse to allow trans people to be part of them is an action which speaks for itself.Report
Sure.
But now we’re back to whether someone is obligated to purchase an entertainment product.
Have you ever picked up a case of it? Or even a can?Report
I drink less than one beer a decade.Report
“It was when the target was widened to include trans people they could no longer regard themselves as part of the targeted group.”
apparently you need to have this conversation with Kazzy, who claimed that trans people had nothing to do with this and it was merely a natural downturn in the sales of AB InBev products.Report
If they’re serious about “targeting everyone”, then they can have a few seconds each on a large number of diverse people.
This was in the “spokespeople who we’re supposed to admire and want to be like” type.
If they’d gone with a trans race car driver or the trans creator of the Matrix movie then it might have gone better. Or wasn’t there a Bond girl who was trans?
What they did was virtue signaling how “Inclusive”, i.e. woke, they are. Their spokesperson’s only claim to fame is this side of this issue, so it’s like getting a BLM activist or a pro-choice activist.
All right thinking people support trans rights. That implies, if you don’t support trans rights then we don’t want you.Report
To be honest, I think that Dylan would have made the *PERFECT* Bud Light Seltzer spokesperson.
Talk about the light flavor, talk about the joys of fizzy drinks, talk about how great it is to enjoy low-calorie entertainments.
Blow some bubbles from your palm into the camera. Make a statement!
As it is… well, everybody lost money. Well, except Dylan.Report
I think she got so much hate the experience was traumatic. Not the kind of exposure she wanted.
I have a lot of sympathy for Dylan. This wasn’t her fault. It was reasonable to expect the marketing head of a fortune 100 company would have some idea what she’s doing.Report
I make my buying decisions mostly based on practical matters. A pretty face means little next to a cost/benefit number.
However what she’s trying to do is identity marketing. She might even be getting into identity politics.
Her spokes person’s only claim to fame is being a trans-activist. What if their only claim to fame was being a BLM activist or an anti-gun activist?
This might have still blown up on her if she’d gone with a trans-athlete, but I think the odds are lower and it’d look a lot less like malpractice.Report
As opposed to her only claim to fame being a football player?
Like, seriously, what does a football player know about beer that a trans activist doesn’t?Report
That’s a really good example. Thank you.
The difference is a lot of their existing customers fantasize about being a football player.
If you swap those then you’ve changed it from being the-beer-of-football to being the-trans-beer.Report
That’s a painful interview. Well worth watching in it’s long form.
Lots of buzz words. No research on how things are going to affect the existing consumer base that she clearly disrespects.
She’s making million dollar decisions about a very well established product. At best her plan was “Make this a woke beer because it’s what I’d buy”.
That is NOT how our marketing guys do things.
I can ask them details on who/how/how-often/why our products are used and they’ll have answers. Time after time they’ll get a group of customers together to see how they react to our “improvements”.
If there are problems with our improvements then we’ll have to make changes.
The customer is god. That means marketing is the voice of god because they’re the ones who go out and find out what the customer wants and then tell the rest of us to get in line.Report
The next step of it, which again, I’m speculating we may have reached, is for it to rub off on people who don’t care or aren’t even aware there was an issue. You get people thinking something like ‘hey there used to always be bud lite in the cooler at the tailgate, but last time Jim brought Coors. I guess I will bring Coors too.” Same with the other stuff. ‘All my buddies used to talk about x show on ESPN. Now they all watch y show on FS1. Guess I should check that one out too.’ Suddenly you have a disastrous ripple effect where you’re losing market share at an exponential rate and there’s nothing that can fix it, including a total about face on whatever it was that set off the reaction.Report
Yep.
When our gaming group said “Let’s stop playing D&D for a while. Let’s use the Fate system instead!”, you know what? Everybody schooled up on the Fate system and we all switched.
It wasn’t political. We just changed because one of us found it and liked it.
After we finish our current (D&D) questline, we’re going to hop over to the Old Gods of Appalachia RPG system.
If D&D came out and said “We’re no longer going to try to appeal to aging Gen Xers, we’re going to appeal to Zoomers in 6th Edition!”, we’d probably shrug and keep playing 5th, or flop over to Pathfinder, or see what’s going on with the millions of homebrews out there.
Seriously. This is entertainment. The second (and I mean the *SECOND*) it becomes onerous… hey. We can do something else. We do this for fun, after all.Report
D&D better not do anything to alienate its fan base, then. Heh.
Actually, I haven’t followed the open game license story – I’m surprised you haven’t written about that. (hint, hint)Report
I’m not going to write anything about that stupidity.
Other than to say that companies keep saying stuff like “that’s a $100,000,000 economy out there! If we got OUR FAIR SHARE OF IT, we’d make 10%! WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING!!!! THAT’S TEN MILLION!!!!” and then something like “hey wait where are you guys all going wait wait come back”.Report
That makes sense. Additionally, it’s reasonable to think that a cheaper, undifferentiated product would be more vulnerable to this. There are probably a lot of products that rely on consumer *habit* when their companies think they have consumer *loyalty*. Disney is starting to realize that people are just as happy with Dreamworks Animation and Universal Theme Parks.Report
“Being told “you are no longer our target audience” is a good way to inspire someone to investigate alternatives.”
No one told anyone that. Maybe some folks inferred that because Bud Light targeted a different audience briefly.
“I am under *ZERO* obligation to keep purchasing your entertainment product. *NONE*.”
Sure. Which has what to do with my argument?
My argument — really my friends’ argument — is that InBev has made a concerted and intentional effort to chase the flavor of the week rather than build and maintain brand loyalty. That is why they were losing customers for a while and why this blew up in their face so bad.
It’s not “OMG, they did something so terrible that their fiercely loyal customers felt they had no choice but to jump ship.”
It’s “Bud Light had customers who preferred them but actually very little brand loyalty such that when they did something folks didn’t like, lots of them just jumped ship.”
If you really love someone and they upset you, you fight like hell with them to get through the pain so you can continue to love someone.
If you are meh on someone and they upset you, you’re pretty fine to let them drift away.
People have been pretty meh on the Bud Light brand for a while because the Bud Light brand was okay with the meh.Report
At least I got to cover the “Bud Light” square on my Jaybird bingo card. What next?Report
In fairness to Jaybird I brought it up.Report
Maybe some folks inferred that because Bud Light targeted a different audience briefly.
They may have merely inferred that, but did they infer that incorrectly?
I mean, did you see what the marketing exec in charge of the brand said?
Do you think that she did so poorly on her job that her previous audience inferred that incorrectly?
It’s not “OMG, they did something so terrible that their fiercely loyal customers felt they had no choice but to jump ship.”
I’m not saying that they did something terrible.
I’m saying that they went after a different, larger, less fratty, less out-of-touch, more inclusive audience.
How is that terrible?
It sounds almost admirable!
It’s not “OMG, they did something so terrible that their fiercely loyal customers felt they had no choice but to jump ship.”
And if you only kinda like them, and you communicate this, and instead of them apologizing right away, they explain that that’s your problem, not theirs, and then only after you’re packing your stuff up do they release a press release that says “I never wanted to start a fight”, what then?
Is this a two-way street?
People have been pretty meh on the Bud Light brand for a while because the Bud Light brand was okay with the meh.
They tried to tap into enthusiasm. It wasn’t enthusiasm for their old audience, though.
Seriously: Do a taste test of Coors Light and Bud Light. Can you tell the difference?Report
Yea you didn’t read anything I wrote initially and just wanted to hop up on your hobby horse.
Enjoy the ride. I’ll sit this one out.Report
“My argument — really my friends’ argument — is that InBev has made a concerted and intentional effort to chase the flavor of the week rather than build and maintain brand loyalty. ”
…so what you’re saying here is, they said to the previous target audience that they were no longer the target audience?Report
No they told the previous target audience they were adding an additional target audience. That the original target audience decided to get its knickers in a twist was not on InBev.Report
Please coordinate with Kazzy, because he doesn’t think that’s what happened.Report
I should have said “I agree with you” and not “Yeah”.
My yeah was a nod to your post being the correct take.Report
That’s all I demand. Was that so hard?Report
Like Pinky I am not arguing against a cause and effect. I am speculating that the boycott has been so structurally damaging to the brand that even more people are now not buying it for non-boycott reasons. Based on what I saw I think it has snowballed well passed the original controversy, which makes it the most successful boycott of a consumer product I can personally remember.Report
Consumers are largely creatures of habit.
The boycott (or the mess as a whole, or both) may have changed habits.
That’s kind of an amazing accomplishment.Report
I agree with the snowball effect and that many are avoiding the brand because what others might perceive of them if they were drinking it – not bc they care about Mulvaney one way or another.
And I can’t think of a more impactful consumer boycott either.Report
Kazzy, I’m interested to see you claiming that transphobia isn’t a problem and we shouldn’t be concerned at this clear evidence of it.Report
Um, ok.Report
It is the height of transphobia to attempt to explain away bigots’ boycotts by pointing to statistics and making vague statements about “trends in market share”. I mean, we all know what’s really going on here; dudebros clearly want to punish the company for daring to hint at an uncomfortable truth. And why are you so determined to die on this hill, anyway?Report
“why are you so determined to die on this hill, anyway” say the folks who refuse to buy a beer because it featured a trans spokesperson.Report
When Team Blue insists something or someone look like them we call it identity politics.Report
Having fun?Report
A little bit of good news on the Education front:
I didn’t like how it went with “this state” instead of naming the state (clickbait? really?) but then when I clicked through and saw that it was Texas, I realized that they were going a different, much more familiar, route.Report
It looks like nearly 2/3 of the students are qualifying for the advanced math class (43% of black, 60% of Latino, 82% of white, and, while it doesn’t say, presumably 90+% of Asian students). How advanced can a class be if 65% of students qualify?
I like the approach of relying on standardized tests and grades rather than subjective teacher recommendations, but it sounds like they’re setting the threshold too low. If it works out, great, but I’m skeptical. I suspect that either they’re going to have a lot of kids failing, or they’re going to have to make the class easy enough for kids with IQs in the low 90s to pass.Report
It’s possible they’re fluffing it up somehow. However I’ve read articles suggesting that the stats on performance of US students is such that our average are actually pretty strong and our best are as good as anyone in the world. The difference is that our bad are so outlier abysmal it creates a misleading impression about what the norm actually is.Report
Good news there, but sorta making the point that a lot of people have made that there is a lot of discrimination in education, if literally just ‘judging how well people are at math by testing how well they do at math instead of by teacher vibes’ reveals a huge amount of obvious prior bias.Report
You don’t see the word Texas without clicking through…?Report
Not in Twitter.
Here’s what Twitter shows:
Another reason Twitter is stupid, I guess. The imbed clearly shows most of the article’s first sentence and immediately identifies the state.Report
Reading the Israel-Hamas content is a solid reminder of how rarely people who use the words “everybody”, “nobody”, “always”, and “never” demonstrate the credibility that would justify their use of those words.
Why would another person believe that someone is familiar enough with millions (even billions) of people or things or actions to be able to characterize every last one of them? Am I learning about the world from this person, or am I just learning about the tilt of this person’s blinders?Report
Here is a good long video essay on the decline of mid-market movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQF82Kj-v0EReport
John Woo is coming out with a new movie for Christmas.
It’s called Silent Night. Warning: This is a red band trailer. It doesn’t show the red (or green, for that matter) banner at the beginning but there is graphic violence in the trailer. Viewer discretion is advised.
Okay. It looks like he watched John Wick and said “there is no poetry!” and wanted to come back and show us how it’s done but, get this:
The movie has no dialog.
What?
THE MOVIE HAS NO DIALOG. LIKE THERE IS NOT PEOPLE TALKING TO EACH OTHER IN THE MOVIE.
Sure, there’s scenes where, like, the radio is on in the background or there’s background chatter or something like that but PEOPLE DO NOT SPEAK TO EACH OTHER IN THE MOVIE.
AND IT IS CALLED “SILENT NIGHT”.Report
Well, it’ll be easy to dub!Report
Everything but the first two seconds is covered with red.Report
Will they get as much out of the silence as the “Hush” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer did?Report
I’m pretty sure that it won’t be silent, per se. It’ll be ‘splody, shooty, and squishy. I also imagine that there will be a lot of music in the flick, both diegetic and non-diegetic.
This will be an opportunity for a sound-mixing Oscar *OR* it’ll be a car wreck.
If there’s anybody who might be able to pull this off, it’s John Woo. Maybe. He might have been able to pull it off once. In the 90’s. Maybe.Report
“Hush” wasn’t silent. Someone cast a spell preventing anyone in the city from speaking so you couldn’t hear them scream.Report
When liberals talk about Biden not, in fact, being like Trump, it’s because of stories like this:
There is no universe in which Trump would ever allow the DoJ under his watch to investigate his own conduct, much less be interviewed voluntarily about it. Biden may well be unethical in some respects, but he is, at least, a Law and Order President.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/politics/joe-biden-special-counsel-hur-interview-documents-probe/index.htmlReport
How does one discuss politics with someone who either will not or cannot see his political opponents as human beings, but rather sees them as caricatures either silly or grotesque?Report
I don’t know if you made that comment from a BSDI perspective, but that’s where we are.Report
Oh, and if your comment is a response to Lee calling you a troll, we don’t get that many new participants around here. We have one too-regular commenter who makes outlandish posts and gets blocked and deleted sometimes a dozen times per day, and it’s left us with a bit of social anxiety. But I’ve noticed your name recently, and we’re generally open to new commenters, so I hope you stick around.Report
Up to a certain point, it can be get-some-popcorn-and-enjoy-the-show amusing when people read things that haven’t been said into what has been said. Lee did not go beyond that point, which I appreciate. Many do, and I am grateful to the moderators who keep that in check.
I’ve been reading Ordinary Times for many years, and used to banter occasionally with “Will Truman” and R. Tod Kelly on Twitter in pre-Musk times. I expect I’ll stay around. I appreciate your taking the time to write that comment.Report
See that? We never get anyone new.Report
For almost 30 years, I have been part of a group that formed on Usenet. In the early days, we tried many times to add people we liked who hadn’t been around during our 1992-94 formation period, but only one ended up staying.Report
It’s great to see a lurker come out of the woodwork and join in the comments. Especially someone like you who really gets the spirit of the site. Glad to see you here!Report
I do it all the time around here with people who see me that way. If it’s important you can’t let yourself get sidetracked by the other person’s failings.Report
Your counterpoint has made me think for a while, which I appreciate.
I keep a folder of submission ideas for Ordinary Times (I’ve been reading the site for years, but have not been an active commenter), and have just added a new topic to it. Thank you!Report
Just imagine that person in a reeducation camp.Report
SBF’s trial is ongoing and today Caroline Ellison took the stand.
Inner City Press is livetweeting everything and it’s riveting:
Here’s a tweet from the middle that has something for everybody:
Report
Holy cow. The trial continues. Caroline is still on direct and not cross yet. So any thoughts like “Holy crap, they’re going to put SBF away for a billion years!” is premature.
But holy crap. They’re going to put SBF away for a billion years.Report
It’s nice to see the center left finally coming around to what I’ve been saying about the “deaths of despair” narrative since the original paper was published. The exogenous effects of opioid availability were always a much better fit for the data than the “economic despair” story Deaton and Case were pushing for ideological reasons.Report
What made all those folks turn to opiods to self medicate?Report
You’re assuming that it’s self-medication, but recreational drug use goes back to prehistoric times. Two things started changing in the 90s:
1. Opioids became more widely available, and the fact that they were available as a prescription drug created the illusion that they were relatively safe to abuse for recreational purposes.
2. Baby Boomers, the first generation to mainstream harder drug use, started reaching middle age. Interestingly, the drug-related death rate for white men aged 45-54 started increasing sharply around 1991, right as the oldest Boomers started entering that age bracket.
It’s plausible that economic conditions played a small contributing role, but claims that they were the main causal driver are really hard to square with the data.Report
You get surgery and they give you 10x as many opioids as you need. If you decide they’re like aspirin then maybe you have a big problem after a month or two.Report
The center left is “finally” coming around to Matt’s conclusion that “If you decide to implement paternalistic health policies, you get better health outcomes; if you don’t, you don’t.”?
OK, consider me come around. I for one welcome our new nanny state overlords!Report
I feel that people latched on to the narrative that destructive drug addiction is often due to a feeling of helplessness in the world (Which is true.) to try to peddle the silly idea that Americans were just dying from it.
A lot of Boomers did start using harder drugs when they hit middle age, but it’s not due to ‘despair’, it is, as you say, due to a) they were heavily into drugs their entire life, and b) opiates were seen as safe, and also c) midlife is the time that a lot of people get weird and sorta aimless and try dumb things.
This doesn’t make it some new actual pattern or anything to do with ‘despair’, it’s just that is exactly the age they start doing that sort of stuff, and they were a large group that was predisposed to do it.
And, um, you know…a lot of them were hooked on opiates for pain reasons. They didn’t even ‘decide’ to start. They were given drugs by a doctor, they know the pain gets worse, they seem to need more and more pills to manage it, at some point they can’t get enough pills from the doctor so have to start getting them under the table, and they don’t know what’s going on until everything falls apart. That’s not despair, that’s bad medicine! There was a billion dollar lawsuit over it!
Now, the thing is: I hope this doesn’t cause people to ignore the actual foundation this false narrative builds off of, as drug addiction, or at least drug addiction so badly it destroys someone’s life (And to be clear, by drugs, I also mean alcohol), is pretty heavily correlated with not actually having much to start with (Which should not be confused with just being sad.), and one of the easiest way to stop people from falling into that is to…give them the resources they need to live. This is still true, even if the dumbass idea that society had somehow fallen apart enough (Without us really noticing) for that to explain any sort of large trend in death was nonsense.Report
Southern US states are statistical sponges when it comes to federal “welfare” receipts. Every program you can think of. But find a white person in the South who admits to receiving these funds. You generally can’t. Even when you see people running EBT cards at the Winn Dixie, they won’t admit to having the cards, much less needing the cards. Because in the South, poverty is still viewed through a lens of moral failing.
I suspect a lot of opioid use, abuse and excess death falls into the same category. Its a “death of Despair” because it occurs in economically depressed areas, among people who experience that economic condition and then drug addiction as shameful moral failings, instead of understandable reactions in a system that – as David points out – isn’t supporting them as it should.Report
See, I don’t think that’s technically correct. Poverty, itself, is fine.
What isn’t fine is accepting any help, and certainly not any sort of _organized_ help. And certainly not anything that’s labeled as help. And if it is labeled as help, the more local to you the better…family first, friends next, the church, a local non-profit, local government, state government, Federal government, etc, etc, each worse and more embarrassing than the one before.Report
Nope. Poverty is not fine. The moral failing that goes with it is a major reason that my governor won’t expand Medicaid to cover the working poor. Because he believes they should get good jobs that provide healthcare. Which you can’t get unless you work on it. Etc.Report
Here’s an analysis in WaPo tying overdoses to occupation:
The results are fairly startling: 1 out of every 5 people who died of an overdose in 2020 usually worked in construction or restaurants. These folks lived in a different universe from those who worked the safest jobs in the country: Education and computer work lost 6 and 9 people per 100,000, respectively. Combined, about 1 in 100 overdose victims nationwide worked those jobs.
…
The share of workers in an occupation who are uninsured correlates even more strongly with its overdose death rate than education. As Haley says, folks working blue-collar jobs could be both more likely to get injured than their white-collar peers and less likely to get that injury treated by the formal health-care system. That could lead many to self-medicate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/06/jobs-likely-to-overdose/
As always, I have to take their numbers at face value unless someone has a contradicting set.
But their thesis sounds logical and matches my personal observation.Report
I think it’s kinda a mistake to only look at overdoses for self-medication when the most common sort of self-medication that kills people does it mostly via liver failure (And for some reason we’re fine with.), but looking just at overdoses:
I think we often pretend that once people get health insurance they’re magically able to pay for all their healthcare, and that just isn’t true.
Even if they can afford to ‘get that injury treated by the formal health-care system’ it could easily be ‘Will see a doctor once after an injury and get a prescription, but unable to afford any part of medical care besides that prescription, like physical therapy or any sort of recuperation period that would allow real recovery instead of treating symptoms.’ And when the prescription runs out, they just…keep buying it in other ways.Report
Today (11 October 2023) is World Mental Health Day.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to check in on yourself, because no one is immune to mental health challenges.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to check in on those around you, because it’s not always clear when people are suffering and even if they aren’t, expressing concern and empathy is a good thing.
I suggest you take it as a reminder to dissociate mental health challenges from stigma, because it’s easy to dismiss those struggling with mental health issues as weak, incapable, or unreliable, but none of that is necessarily true.Report
Last week we mentioned the awful murder of Josh Kruger. He got shot in his apartment 7 times.
Well… the family of the man who shot Josh is saying that the man who shot Josh was in a relationship with him and had been since he (the shooter) was 15.
So.
There’s that.Report
Statistically it can’t be discounted. When it comes to murder strangers are the exception.Report
Shoot a guy twice, maybe it’s random.
Shoot a guy seven times? That’s personal.Report
I mean, that story sounds pretty horrible, but…it’s sorta third-hand by the time we hear it, a story told by someone who is looking more and more like the murderer, and has every reason to come up with justifications.
I get why his family believes it, but…the fact that Robert Davis was secretly visiting Josh Kruger does not really prove any sort of relationship.
That said, the allegations are easy enough to prove or disprove with the evidence the police already have, if there was blackmail they’ll probably find it, so we’ll see where it goes.Report
Waiting to see how things develop before spewing a hot take? We’d have to shut this operation down.Report
Yeah. Maybe they didn’t know each other.
And we’d have to go back to the old “this is crime!” narrative.Report
If that’s how things develop. Most of us can wait. There’s no prize for jumping the gun.Report
It makes you sometimes wonder why we have news organizations at all.Report
Many countries don’t have news organizations, if you wonder how that usually works out.Report
I had suspected that “trying to help him get through life” had been a euphemism for some kind of sugar-daddy situation, but I did not have “started when the shooter was 15” on my bingo card.
The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that police are saying that Kruger had “disturbing” sexually explicit photos on his phone, but are not giving details.
Insofar as the family is not being entirely straightforward, I would guess that it’s in the direction of minimizing the shooter’s agency, to make it sound like he had no other way out, rather than just making the whole thing up out of whole cloth.
But we’ll see.Report
Babylon Bee: Palestinian Flag Outside Rashida Tlaib’s Office Seen Throwing Pride Flag Off The Roof
https://babylonbee.com/news/palestinian-flag-outside-rashida-tlaibs-office-seen-throwing-pride-flag-off-the-roofReport
HE.
Needs.
To.
Go.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/politics/bob-menendez-superseding-indictment-foreign-agent/index.htmlReport
What a Dickstein.Report
yepReport
$41,000 dent repair on this Rivian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKPfy5djvLc&ab_channel=MattBoyette
From an article linking to the YT vid:
“According to the man who performed unauthorized – but much cheaper – dent repair (the owner trucked the electric truck to another state to avoid having to spend $41,000 for the “authorized” repair) the Rivian EV is designed as a one-piece (or mostly one-piece) shell that is repaired by being replaced.”
“The carapace must come off, which includes the glass and weatherstripping. Then a new carapace must be installed, along with the glass and weatherstripping, everything refinished to match. As you can imagine, this gets into money.
$41,000 to be precise.”
Stunning. MSRP on a new Rivian, base model, is 73K That’s 56% of the cost of a new one.Report
To be fair, when we had an accident that dented the side of our Prius, the Official Insurance-Pays-For-It job cost $25,000 and involved a similar scope of work. The Out-Of-Pocket repair cost would have been $250 and involved a couple taps with a hammer and then a half-hour with a power buffer.Report
Yeah, it’s not really an indictment on the specific vehicle, more on how the are assembled by the manufacturer. I’d venture that not a lot of people think about repair costs / impact to their insurance bill when they shop for a new or newer car.Report
There’s a charity out there that is shutting down because of dumb reasons.
This is dumb. Holy crap, is this dumb. Goodness gracious, this is dumb.Report
“Hey — instead of giving all this money away, how about we keep it for ourselves?”
“Sounds great, but we would get in all kinds of trouble for that.”
“Oh right, bummer. Wait — what if we say…”Report
I’m not following. Could you spell out the details of what you’re suggesting might have happened here?Report
Oh it wasn’t a theory, just a joke – I was facetiously implying that the woke motivation was just a pretext for deciding not to give money away anymore.Report
When people think long and hard about something, they are going to come up with many strange outcomes if they go to the logical conclusion. George Orwell was meaner and said “there are something so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”Report
If you find yourself in really dumb intellectual conclusions, then one of the premises was wrong.
Here they’re probably taking “ethics as an absolute” rather than a guiding suggestion.Report
They’re mistaking by-products for goals.
Getting clout and praise is something, ideally, that happens after you do a good job helping people, yes.
But the goal isn’t the clout and praise.
The goal is having done a good job helping people.Report
I heard about this a month or two ago. I kind of suspect that any foundation run by the kind of people who would do this had already been reduced to a skinsuit and was primarily giving money to stupid and/or evil causes already, so maybe it’s not great loss.
I took a look at their web site and couldn’t really get a concrete idea of what kind of causes they were funding before.
Anyway, the lesson here is never to donate to a general-purpose philanthropy organization. Huge swaths of the sector have been totally taken over by wokium junkies. Organizations with very specific missions are probably more resistant to this.Report