Maybe this trend started earlier, but I encounter it enough now that I think it's real: service workers have stopped saying "you're welcome" or just "welcome" when you tell them "thank you." They just say "thanks" or "thank you" back, perhaps with a different inflection like, "No, thank you!"
It's too feminine, and not in a good way -- in that annoying passive-aggressive way, while also mirroring what the other person said. I'm sure that businesses have run a variety of tests and determined that most customers feel better when the clerk says "thank you" back instead of "you're welcome." But you'd think there would be a subset of these industries that would cater to the apparently tiny niche I belong to, just like some low or mid-priced restaurants don't have waitresses who lay it on extra thick with the hiiii omigod you guys look so awesome, i mean, you're like totally the bestest new friends i've made tonighttt!!!
Anyone know of places where it's still common to hear "you're welcome"?
October 31, 2009
October 30, 2009
Diversity destroying devilish diversions
By now we've become numb to news reports about how the cult of diversity has led to yet another restriction on workplace interactions between men and women or some new unwieldy phrase we're supposed to use for cripples ("persons with disabilities") or for vagrants and bums ("historically teetotalingly challenged communities").
But what incentive do the masters of cultural regulation have to limit their powers to only the most common-sense cases, assuming even those existed? Obviously those beyond criticism pay no price to meddle in every aspect of everyone's lives, so of course we'll see a lot more of that than before.
Here's an NYT article on the pathetic move by schools to basically outlaw Halloween for kids, all in the name of "positive costumes" and tolerance for other cultures. Because, you know, most kids these days would be dressing up in blackface if it weren't for the principal telling them not to. Indeed, why don't we just require all little boys and girls to dress up like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks?
And how's this for a two-faced policy? -- "French maids are explicitly discouraged." Jeez, your daughter tries to honor the oppressed gender of a foreign culture's working class, and that's the thanks she gets for it?
Clearly the push by paranoid parents for fewer toy weapons and bloody imagery began as part of the "save the kids" campaign that only began once kids became incredibly safe. That is, during the mid-1990s, right as rates of violent crime and child abuse were plummeting. My generation's parents saw the sickening news of Adam Walsh's murder, and yet they still let us dress up like serial killers for Halloween. The super-neurotic parents of the past 15 years, though, have managed to pressure the public and private spheres to deprive their kids of the joys of mock violence.
Even more, this has become a status-signaling contest among parents (here's one):
Time was, you bragged to other parents about how rich your child's life was -- "Look at how well little Jayden can play the piano, and he's pretty popular with the girls, too!" Now parents compete to see whose kid is the biggest loser:
"I won't allow him to play sports since they only glorify violence and competition, and I won't pay for driving school since I can drive him around just fine myself. I mean, not hanging out with friends is good for him anyways -- gives him more time to volunteer at the Martin Luther King Center for Persons with Disabilities. He'll never get into Columbia without enough community service, you know."
If a bunch of nutcase parents want to harm their own children's social lives, that's their prerogative. But by creating a cultural regulation system, we empower these fruitcakes to spoil the fun of other people's children. Without the diversity stick -- which no one can object to being beaten with -- they'd have very little to force their paranoid practices on everyone else. But just cloak it in some double-talk about positive role models, and there you go.
Banning Halloween -- another unintended consequence of the diversity regulators.
But what incentive do the masters of cultural regulation have to limit their powers to only the most common-sense cases, assuming even those existed? Obviously those beyond criticism pay no price to meddle in every aspect of everyone's lives, so of course we'll see a lot more of that than before.
Here's an NYT article on the pathetic move by schools to basically outlaw Halloween for kids, all in the name of "positive costumes" and tolerance for other cultures. Because, you know, most kids these days would be dressing up in blackface if it weren't for the principal telling them not to. Indeed, why don't we just require all little boys and girls to dress up like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks?
And how's this for a two-faced policy? -- "French maids are explicitly discouraged." Jeez, your daughter tries to honor the oppressed gender of a foreign culture's working class, and that's the thanks she gets for it?
Clearly the push by paranoid parents for fewer toy weapons and bloody imagery began as part of the "save the kids" campaign that only began once kids became incredibly safe. That is, during the mid-1990s, right as rates of violent crime and child abuse were plummeting. My generation's parents saw the sickening news of Adam Walsh's murder, and yet they still let us dress up like serial killers for Halloween. The super-neurotic parents of the past 15 years, though, have managed to pressure the public and private spheres to deprive their kids of the joys of mock violence.
Even more, this has become a status-signaling contest among parents (here's one):
"I'm not sure what is driving this memo [about approved costumes]," Mr. Bishoff said. "But perhaps it is reaction to years past. Sometimes kids will have those 'Scream' masks, but usually not too blood and gutsy. I mean, can't parents have discretion? The fact is, if parents are too stupid to not send kids to school with hockey masks as Jason, they are probably too stupid to read this memo."Yeah, don't those stupid parents know that letting your kid dress up as Jason is the first step toward him becoming a machete-wielding maniac? Better yet, you'll have to follow him around for a few hours to make sure that he doesn't play with boys who have stupid parents that let them wear Freddy Krueger gloves. Bad influences. Well it's either that or just not let your kid go out at all -- which is what you'll probably decide on, since micro-monitoring is cheaper to do at home.
Time was, you bragged to other parents about how rich your child's life was -- "Look at how well little Jayden can play the piano, and he's pretty popular with the girls, too!" Now parents compete to see whose kid is the biggest loser:
"I won't allow him to play sports since they only glorify violence and competition, and I won't pay for driving school since I can drive him around just fine myself. I mean, not hanging out with friends is good for him anyways -- gives him more time to volunteer at the Martin Luther King Center for Persons with Disabilities. He'll never get into Columbia without enough community service, you know."
If a bunch of nutcase parents want to harm their own children's social lives, that's their prerogative. But by creating a cultural regulation system, we empower these fruitcakes to spoil the fun of other people's children. Without the diversity stick -- which no one can object to being beaten with -- they'd have very little to force their paranoid practices on everyone else. But just cloak it in some double-talk about positive role models, and there you go.
Banning Halloween -- another unintended consequence of the diversity regulators.
October 29, 2009
Why straight men rationally dislike gay men
[Inspired by a conversation I just overheard in the campus dining hall between a flaming gay and his homely but slutty chick friend, who was sharing quite loudly the details of her waking up next to a guy whose name she didn't know but had gotten banged by earlier. Only a freshman in college, she is well on her way to becoming this middle-aged whore that Roissy observed at the end of her trainwreck.]
A common response to the question, "Why do straight guys have such disgust for gays?" is that they shouldn't -- after all, less competition! But because only around 3% of men are homosexual, that's not exactly weeding out a lot of potential competition. Factor in how desirable these guys would be if straight, and you're left with even fewer -- maybe 1% or less of all males weeded out.
Of course there are all sorts of visceral reactions that straights have toward gays, the most obvious being the thought -- or heaven forbid, the mental image -- of two guys doing it. And as enlightened human beings, we're supposed to put aside such "yuck test" results and provide clearer reasons.
So here's a perfectly rational motivation that straight men have to make homosexuals knock off their gayness: their interactions with (straight) women represent a form of pollution. Gay men are always there to convince a woman that she doesn't need to lose any weight, that any guy would be lucky to get with her, that she still has plenty of time before she has to settle down, and that she shouldn't feel guilty about being a slut --
I mean, god gave you that nasty thing down there for a reason girlfriend, you should own it! Psh, don't let anybody else tell you how to live your life!
The result is a woman with an inflated ego, less shame, and more venereal diseases. Some poor schlub will end up dating or (perish the thought) marrying this skag, and it won't be the gay himself who bears the costs of dating a polluted woman but the boyfriend or husband. Think of how much better the relationship would be if she were more humble, not so shameless, and free of syphilis. Indeed, it is inconceivable that the gay enabler will date or marry any such polluted woman. When pollution costs them nothing, they will churn it out like a tidal wave, with the costs being borne by straight men.
It is no surprise, then, that straights have an impulse to get the gays to keep quiet -- to do what they want behind closed doors, but to not ruin the dating and mating pool that we straights have to drink from.
Just to show that this is not irrational prejudice against gays per se, let's ask if there's a sub-group of straight men who also play the ego-inflating, shame-scrubbing role. Indeed there is -- we call them "white knights," "captain save-a-ho," and so on. These are loser straight guys whose only hail-mary hope of getting laid is to find a fairly homely and slutty woman and tell her that she's too beautiful for those other men out there, that she shouldn't be ashamed of being repeatedly used and tossed aside, etc.
Both he and the gay bff have selfish reasons for propping her up -- the former to hopefully sleep with her, the latter to have another close friend -- and just like the gay friend, his servile worship is tantamount to pollution. After all, once her mind's been ruined, he'll either have gotten some or not, and some other guy will have to pay the cost of dating an artificially delusional woman. And just as we saw before, most straight guys get disgusted when they see this kind of behavior:
Dude, you're pathetic -- grow some balls and stop kissing her ass.
Still, if gay men are only 3% of the male population, why make such a big fuss? Simple: each gay guy can and does spoil the brains of multiple females. Where they are in highish concentration, it might be around 10% of all females who they manage to pollute. That percentage would be frighteningly high -- as though there were one on each block.
The Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase is famous for showing that, among other things, government regulation isn't necessary to solve problems like pollution of drinking water. The people who drink the water can negotiate with the polluters, and if the costs of these transactions are low, they'll settle their differences on their own. For example, the people might simply pay the polluters not to pollute if their harm was greater than the polluters' benefit. (Alternatively, the polluters might pay the people to put up with the filth if the pollution benefited the polluters more than it harmed the people.)
Before the openly gay era, the costs of straights negotiating with gays to keep their offensive behavior out of the public sphere were pretty low -- basically just a social stigma against homosexuality. When the stigmatized group members contemplate "coming out" in general, they see how difficult it will be, so they don't bother haggling at all. All the stigmatizers would have to do is shoot them a look like, "hey, remember what your place is," and that would have been the sum of the transaction costs.
In the post-disco era, though, the stigmatized group feels emboldened to bargain and fight back, so that the costs of negotiating between straights and gays has skyrocketed. Any straight guy who now says -- just as he would to a fellow straight "white knight" -- "C'mon, knock it off, you're ruining the women we have to date," will find himself on the wrong end of a hate speech lawsuit.
I mean, like, omigod, so -- what -- I can't make my best friend feel better about her open sexuality just because I'm gay? You don't know who you're messing with, mister -- I mean, we didn't struggle at Stonewall for nothing, and bitch we aren't going back!
Obviously the government isn't going to step in to deal with this market failure either. So really the only option that straight men have is to move somewhere else where the dating pool is not only free of homosexual pollution but has been purified by the tacit collective agreement among men to keep women's self-destructive tendencies from growing out of control.
A common response to the question, "Why do straight guys have such disgust for gays?" is that they shouldn't -- after all, less competition! But because only around 3% of men are homosexual, that's not exactly weeding out a lot of potential competition. Factor in how desirable these guys would be if straight, and you're left with even fewer -- maybe 1% or less of all males weeded out.
Of course there are all sorts of visceral reactions that straights have toward gays, the most obvious being the thought -- or heaven forbid, the mental image -- of two guys doing it. And as enlightened human beings, we're supposed to put aside such "yuck test" results and provide clearer reasons.
So here's a perfectly rational motivation that straight men have to make homosexuals knock off their gayness: their interactions with (straight) women represent a form of pollution. Gay men are always there to convince a woman that she doesn't need to lose any weight, that any guy would be lucky to get with her, that she still has plenty of time before she has to settle down, and that she shouldn't feel guilty about being a slut --
I mean, god gave you that nasty thing down there for a reason girlfriend, you should own it! Psh, don't let anybody else tell you how to live your life!
The result is a woman with an inflated ego, less shame, and more venereal diseases. Some poor schlub will end up dating or (perish the thought) marrying this skag, and it won't be the gay himself who bears the costs of dating a polluted woman but the boyfriend or husband. Think of how much better the relationship would be if she were more humble, not so shameless, and free of syphilis. Indeed, it is inconceivable that the gay enabler will date or marry any such polluted woman. When pollution costs them nothing, they will churn it out like a tidal wave, with the costs being borne by straight men.
It is no surprise, then, that straights have an impulse to get the gays to keep quiet -- to do what they want behind closed doors, but to not ruin the dating and mating pool that we straights have to drink from.
Just to show that this is not irrational prejudice against gays per se, let's ask if there's a sub-group of straight men who also play the ego-inflating, shame-scrubbing role. Indeed there is -- we call them "white knights," "captain save-a-ho," and so on. These are loser straight guys whose only hail-mary hope of getting laid is to find a fairly homely and slutty woman and tell her that she's too beautiful for those other men out there, that she shouldn't be ashamed of being repeatedly used and tossed aside, etc.
Both he and the gay bff have selfish reasons for propping her up -- the former to hopefully sleep with her, the latter to have another close friend -- and just like the gay friend, his servile worship is tantamount to pollution. After all, once her mind's been ruined, he'll either have gotten some or not, and some other guy will have to pay the cost of dating an artificially delusional woman. And just as we saw before, most straight guys get disgusted when they see this kind of behavior:
Dude, you're pathetic -- grow some balls and stop kissing her ass.
Still, if gay men are only 3% of the male population, why make such a big fuss? Simple: each gay guy can and does spoil the brains of multiple females. Where they are in highish concentration, it might be around 10% of all females who they manage to pollute. That percentage would be frighteningly high -- as though there were one on each block.
The Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase is famous for showing that, among other things, government regulation isn't necessary to solve problems like pollution of drinking water. The people who drink the water can negotiate with the polluters, and if the costs of these transactions are low, they'll settle their differences on their own. For example, the people might simply pay the polluters not to pollute if their harm was greater than the polluters' benefit. (Alternatively, the polluters might pay the people to put up with the filth if the pollution benefited the polluters more than it harmed the people.)
Before the openly gay era, the costs of straights negotiating with gays to keep their offensive behavior out of the public sphere were pretty low -- basically just a social stigma against homosexuality. When the stigmatized group members contemplate "coming out" in general, they see how difficult it will be, so they don't bother haggling at all. All the stigmatizers would have to do is shoot them a look like, "hey, remember what your place is," and that would have been the sum of the transaction costs.
In the post-disco era, though, the stigmatized group feels emboldened to bargain and fight back, so that the costs of negotiating between straights and gays has skyrocketed. Any straight guy who now says -- just as he would to a fellow straight "white knight" -- "C'mon, knock it off, you're ruining the women we have to date," will find himself on the wrong end of a hate speech lawsuit.
I mean, like, omigod, so -- what -- I can't make my best friend feel better about her open sexuality just because I'm gay? You don't know who you're messing with, mister -- I mean, we didn't struggle at Stonewall for nothing, and bitch we aren't going back!
Obviously the government isn't going to step in to deal with this market failure either. So really the only option that straight men have is to move somewhere else where the dating pool is not only free of homosexual pollution but has been purified by the tacit collective agreement among men to keep women's self-destructive tendencies from growing out of control.
Extra sugar, but non-fat, please
On my way back home from campus, I stopped by a 7-11 to pick up two hard-boiled eggs to make some egg salad (with bacon bleu cheese dip and horseradish mustard... mmm baby). The 60-something clerk looked at them and remarked, "Oh that's really healthy" with a flat affect. I don't like getting health advice from people with one foot in the grave by age 60, so I told her, "I know -- they're full of B-vitamins."
One of her friends then dropped in to ask what she was up to, and she said, "Oh nothing, just eating candy." I didn't even notice it, but sure enough, she was passing the time by shoveling sugar down her piehole. But hey, at least there was no fat in all that sugar! It's no wonder that her face had been destroyed by wrinkles or that she was lugging around 70 pounds of extra fat.
It's one thing when the vegan faggots at Whole Foods give you weird looks when they see that all you're buying is butter, cheese, beef, and pate -- as misguided as their reliance on grains is, at least they aren't popping heaps of jelly beans in their mouths all day. The average person, though, is perfectly happy to chastise you for eating bacon and eggs: "Don't you know what's in that junk? Here, have some ice cream instead."
It's like those people in Starbucks who order a venti 6-pump hazelnut java chip frappuccino with extra, extra, extra caramel sauce -- oh, and can you make that non-fat? No lie, I truly heard a girl order something with "extra, extra, extra" caramel sauce, but non-fat, please. Buncha dipshits. That's how crazy everyone has become by listening to the government and the nutrition experts: if they get even a bit of whipped cream on their frappuccino, they're certain to drop dead of a heart attack on the way out, but the 50 pounds of sugar is just fine because "it gives me energy."
One of her friends then dropped in to ask what she was up to, and she said, "Oh nothing, just eating candy." I didn't even notice it, but sure enough, she was passing the time by shoveling sugar down her piehole. But hey, at least there was no fat in all that sugar! It's no wonder that her face had been destroyed by wrinkles or that she was lugging around 70 pounds of extra fat.
It's one thing when the vegan faggots at Whole Foods give you weird looks when they see that all you're buying is butter, cheese, beef, and pate -- as misguided as their reliance on grains is, at least they aren't popping heaps of jelly beans in their mouths all day. The average person, though, is perfectly happy to chastise you for eating bacon and eggs: "Don't you know what's in that junk? Here, have some ice cream instead."
It's like those people in Starbucks who order a venti 6-pump hazelnut java chip frappuccino with extra, extra, extra caramel sauce -- oh, and can you make that non-fat? No lie, I truly heard a girl order something with "extra, extra, extra" caramel sauce, but non-fat, please. Buncha dipshits. That's how crazy everyone has become by listening to the government and the nutrition experts: if they get even a bit of whipped cream on their frappuccino, they're certain to drop dead of a heart attack on the way out, but the 50 pounds of sugar is just fine because "it gives me energy."
October 25, 2009
Swedish diet and good skin
Swedes eat a lot more animal products than other nations, especially before the anti-fat hysteria that began in the late 1970s, but even after that they haven't fallen as much as the US and UK have for tofu, green-only salads with non-fat dressing, and piles of pasta.
One obvious health benefit is their stature -- they're overshadowed only by the Dutch (who also gorge on animal products), and stand one to two inches taller than Anglo people in the US and UK. Another is penis size: Swedish men have the second-biggest members, just below the pate and cheese-eating men of France.
What about the benefits for women? Sweden certainly has done well in the Miss Universe competition, especially considering its tiny population to draw contestants from. They've done far better than England, and on a per capita basis they've done better than the US. Stereotypes abound about how beautiful Swedish women are, while just the opposite stereotype holds about their English and German contemporaries.
More specifically, Swedish women seem to have really nice skin compared to similar ethnic groups. Pay attention to the skin on the brunette's legs in this ABBA video (hit the HQ button):
Now, the blond is 25 in that video, so her skin tone isn't surprising. But the brunette is 30 years old and still enjoys some pretty taut flesh -- bouncy enough that she can successfully sport a micro-miniskirt after passing the big 3-0. I don't think this is a "good genes" effect, since her face -- despite having nice skin -- isn't so hot. Contrast this with someone like Halle Berry: she had nice skin at 30, but she had nice everything at 30 due to her good genes.
You see lots of females like the brunette from ABBA, but only when they're teenagers: they have skin to die for, and all over, even though they may have plain or ugly faces. So, what we see here is more like a slowing of the aging process, not the robustness of good genes to all manner of environmental insults. If you want to extend young adulthood into your late 20s and 30s, ditch the grains, starches, and sugars, and pile on the eggs, fish, and cheese.
For those interested in the mechanism, I may put up a more in-depth post sometime, but briefly, the key is to avoid sugars and get lots of vitamin A. When a sugar smacks into a protein, a freakish fused glob results, so that the protein can't do its job anymore. These reactions are more likely to happen if there are simply more sugar molecules bouncing around your bloodstream. In particular, the proteins that give you good skin -- collagen and elastin -- can get screwed up by sugars fusing with them. By lowering the level of digestible carbs, you lower your blood sugar, and so lower the damage done by these reactions.
Vitamin A's primary role has nothing to do with vision, despite all the hoopla you heard as a kid about carrots being good for your eyes. It does do that, but mostly vitamin A maintains the proper functioning of your epithelial cells -- the ones on the "surface" (including the lining of your digestive and respiratory tracts). That includes skin. In fact, the most potent anti-acne drug -- accutane -- is a vitamin A derivative. You can only get real vitamin A (retinol) from animal products, whereas the stuff you get from vegetables (the caretinoids like beta-carotene in carrots) is a precursor that your body very inefficiently converts into vitamin A.
For the real deal, you have to eat liver -- that's far and away the most concentrated source. Take cod liver oil if you are unfortunate enough not to like the taste of pate or braunschweiger. It's fat-soluble, so animals also store some in their fat, such as eggs, the fat left on muscle meat, and dairy products. But it's not a ton, so you really have to make sure you work some form of liver into your diet.
One obvious health benefit is their stature -- they're overshadowed only by the Dutch (who also gorge on animal products), and stand one to two inches taller than Anglo people in the US and UK. Another is penis size: Swedish men have the second-biggest members, just below the pate and cheese-eating men of France.
What about the benefits for women? Sweden certainly has done well in the Miss Universe competition, especially considering its tiny population to draw contestants from. They've done far better than England, and on a per capita basis they've done better than the US. Stereotypes abound about how beautiful Swedish women are, while just the opposite stereotype holds about their English and German contemporaries.
More specifically, Swedish women seem to have really nice skin compared to similar ethnic groups. Pay attention to the skin on the brunette's legs in this ABBA video (hit the HQ button):
Now, the blond is 25 in that video, so her skin tone isn't surprising. But the brunette is 30 years old and still enjoys some pretty taut flesh -- bouncy enough that she can successfully sport a micro-miniskirt after passing the big 3-0. I don't think this is a "good genes" effect, since her face -- despite having nice skin -- isn't so hot. Contrast this with someone like Halle Berry: she had nice skin at 30, but she had nice everything at 30 due to her good genes.
You see lots of females like the brunette from ABBA, but only when they're teenagers: they have skin to die for, and all over, even though they may have plain or ugly faces. So, what we see here is more like a slowing of the aging process, not the robustness of good genes to all manner of environmental insults. If you want to extend young adulthood into your late 20s and 30s, ditch the grains, starches, and sugars, and pile on the eggs, fish, and cheese.
For those interested in the mechanism, I may put up a more in-depth post sometime, but briefly, the key is to avoid sugars and get lots of vitamin A. When a sugar smacks into a protein, a freakish fused glob results, so that the protein can't do its job anymore. These reactions are more likely to happen if there are simply more sugar molecules bouncing around your bloodstream. In particular, the proteins that give you good skin -- collagen and elastin -- can get screwed up by sugars fusing with them. By lowering the level of digestible carbs, you lower your blood sugar, and so lower the damage done by these reactions.
Vitamin A's primary role has nothing to do with vision, despite all the hoopla you heard as a kid about carrots being good for your eyes. It does do that, but mostly vitamin A maintains the proper functioning of your epithelial cells -- the ones on the "surface" (including the lining of your digestive and respiratory tracts). That includes skin. In fact, the most potent anti-acne drug -- accutane -- is a vitamin A derivative. You can only get real vitamin A (retinol) from animal products, whereas the stuff you get from vegetables (the caretinoids like beta-carotene in carrots) is a precursor that your body very inefficiently converts into vitamin A.
For the real deal, you have to eat liver -- that's far and away the most concentrated source. Take cod liver oil if you are unfortunate enough not to like the taste of pate or braunschweiger. It's fat-soluble, so animals also store some in their fat, such as eggs, the fat left on muscle meat, and dairy products. But it's not a ton, so you really have to make sure you work some form of liver into your diet.
Losers crying monopoly: Booksellers edition
One of the economic themes I try to emphasize is the bogosity of most of our notions about monopolists who fleece consumers. Historically, that has rarely happened, unless the government propped them up. When the business enjoys a high level of control because it won fair and square, there is basically no such thing as a harmful monopoly in reality (theory allows it, of course).
What we think of as harmful monopolies were actually slashing prices for consumers, boosting the level of output, improving the quality of their product, and thereby driving all of their inferior competitors out of business. It is these losers in the struggle who have raised the biggest stink about an industry becoming more and more concentrated in a few companies' hands. Of course, human nature must harbor a fear of a few people controlling so much stuff, or else the failed business interests could never have whipped up popular support for cracking down on railroads, oil industries, Hollywood, software makers, and whoever will be bruised by the government's antitrust bludgeon next year.
Here is the latest installment of this pathetic story: small-scale bookstores want the government to train its antitrust guns on Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target for slashing their prices on popular books, claiming that this will tend to erode the mom & pop bookstores and give these big guys even greater market share. If you read the WSJ article cited, you'll see that the lower prices are not coming from the retailers paying less to the publishing houses -- instead they're taking greater losses themselves in order to get a leg up on their competitors.
You remember what book-buying was like before Amazon -- hardly any variety, high prices (corrected for inflation), recommendations that reflected whatever weirdos who worked there, and snobby employees who thought that working at a "good bookstore" was going to be their springboard to being crowned Poet Laureate.
I still think bookstores will continue to exist because they allow people to browse through as much of a book as they want before deciding whether or not to buy it. Books really are goods that need to be sampled before someone decides to buy it. That's something that you can't do with any online bookseller. Since bookstores apparently can't compete very well on prices, they'll have to offer a higher-quality browsing experience to stay competitive against online retailers. You've surely noticed how much nicer bookstores have gotten recently, no doubt because of the online threat.
I'm not worried that most people might eventually do their sampling at brick-and-mortar stores and then buy the books they like online. That will wipe out brick-and-mortar stores, but then if they disappeared, so would the online booksellers -- after all, people would have no way to sample books anymore. Only if online retailers can provide a good enough browsing experience will they be able to replace brick-and-mortar stores permanently. As things stand now, though, you can't flip through most books on Amazon. On the plus side, for books that you can browse, you can also search them, which goes far beyond what you can do with a hard copy. Does the book discuss something you're interested in? Just search and find out.
What we think of as harmful monopolies were actually slashing prices for consumers, boosting the level of output, improving the quality of their product, and thereby driving all of their inferior competitors out of business. It is these losers in the struggle who have raised the biggest stink about an industry becoming more and more concentrated in a few companies' hands. Of course, human nature must harbor a fear of a few people controlling so much stuff, or else the failed business interests could never have whipped up popular support for cracking down on railroads, oil industries, Hollywood, software makers, and whoever will be bruised by the government's antitrust bludgeon next year.
Here is the latest installment of this pathetic story: small-scale bookstores want the government to train its antitrust guns on Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target for slashing their prices on popular books, claiming that this will tend to erode the mom & pop bookstores and give these big guys even greater market share. If you read the WSJ article cited, you'll see that the lower prices are not coming from the retailers paying less to the publishing houses -- instead they're taking greater losses themselves in order to get a leg up on their competitors.
You remember what book-buying was like before Amazon -- hardly any variety, high prices (corrected for inflation), recommendations that reflected whatever weirdos who worked there, and snobby employees who thought that working at a "good bookstore" was going to be their springboard to being crowned Poet Laureate.
I still think bookstores will continue to exist because they allow people to browse through as much of a book as they want before deciding whether or not to buy it. Books really are goods that need to be sampled before someone decides to buy it. That's something that you can't do with any online bookseller. Since bookstores apparently can't compete very well on prices, they'll have to offer a higher-quality browsing experience to stay competitive against online retailers. You've surely noticed how much nicer bookstores have gotten recently, no doubt because of the online threat.
I'm not worried that most people might eventually do their sampling at brick-and-mortar stores and then buy the books they like online. That will wipe out brick-and-mortar stores, but then if they disappeared, so would the online booksellers -- after all, people would have no way to sample books anymore. Only if online retailers can provide a good enough browsing experience will they be able to replace brick-and-mortar stores permanently. As things stand now, though, you can't flip through most books on Amazon. On the plus side, for books that you can browse, you can also search them, which goes far beyond what you can do with a hard copy. Does the book discuss something you're interested in? Just search and find out.
October 20, 2009
Is the decline of the genius due to cheaper information transmission?
This year's winners of the Economics "Nobel" followed up on pioneering work done by a previous Nobelist, Ronald Coase, of whose Big Ideas had to do with why firms exist instead of every individual making market transactions with all others. A firm is a planned collective where some people give orders and most people carry them out. Making sure that this all works out OK is costly. If you just entered into a free-market contract with everyone else you had to interact with, you wouldn't need to spend so much monitoring them -- their part of the deal would be clearly spelled out in the contract, unlike the vague "job description" of someone who works in a firm.
But Coase saw that even using the market carried its own costs, called transactions costs. For example, if the tasks you needed someone to do weren't so predictable, you would have to keep re-writing the terms of the contract in the free market. That could waste lots of your time and eat up money if you had to pay fees to lawyers who re-wrote the contract. In this case, it could be less costly to hire that person as a worker for your firm and pay them not for micro-specific tasks but to simply show up and do what their manager says. This allows greater flexibility in having that worker do what you need them to do.
So, the basic idea is that if it costs too much to use the free market, firms will develop and have lots of tasks done "in-house." If it didn't cost anything to use the free market, firms would start shrinking by outsourcing various tasks to independent contractors who they wouldn't have to micro-manage. Here is a straightforward and lively podcast about the nature of the firm from EconTalk.
I think we see something similar in scientific and artistic accomplishment. In some eras, there are geniuses -- individuals who excel at all manner of intellectual tasks -- and in others there are legions of specialists working together. At first you might think the analogy is to free trade: when there are substantial barriers to trade, you won't specialize so much in what you produce because you can't exploit your comparative advantage and because the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. During Descartes' day, this argument would go, there were something like high trade barriers between him and other intellectuals, so Descartes and his contemporaries would lean more in the generalist direction. Now that those barriers are diminished, intellectuals can specialize much more narrowly, and so we don't have geniuses but research teams.
The main barriers to "trading" your output with someone else -- I'll take geometry and you take algebra -- were communication costs. I don't mean just the language barrier, since you can decide on a lingua franca like Latin or English. But being able to bounce your ideas off of other people, give feedback to them, and so on, surely proceeded much more slowly when communication was sent by primitive vs. advanced post systems, let alone when it is sent by telegraph, telephone, or email.
Do these seem like the typical trade barriers? Not really. When we talk about more free vs. less free trade, we're talking more about tariffs, embargoes, and whatnot. If the main reason that Newton couldn't instantly communicate with Leibniz was that there was an aroused populace and a bunch of lawmakers who required him to give up one of his fingers each time he received an article from Leibniz, then the trade analogy would be apt.
Instead, the barrier seems more like a transaction cost, just as you would have to make by meeting with a contractor, communicating back and forth about what the terms of the contract will be, and so on. "OK, I'll take this part of the project, and you work on that other part. We'll keep in touch and update our responsibilities as the project unfolds." How an intellectual work will develop is incredibly unpredictable, so these two free-market transactors are going to have to interact very frequently and keep changing their picture of what each one is going to do until the next interaction.
If the problem looks more like one of transaction costs than of trade barriers, then we should look to Coase's idea about why firms exist. In the 17th C., the constant back-and-forth would have proven too costly, not just financially (before postage, telephones, and email were widespread and cheap) but also in terms of time waiting to hear back, which you could spend doing your own thing. So, rather than contract an intellectual task out to someone else, you'd move it "in-house" and work on it yourself. You'd be a one-person intellectual firm. (As far as I can tell, Coase's idea about the firm just applies to bundling tasks together in an operation, not necessarily a bunch of individual people.)
But if the transaction costs were trivial, as they became during the Industrial Revolution and as they have plummeted even further during the Internet Age, you'd feel the relief of crossing off that task from the long list of shit you already have to do, and let someone else take care of it, provided you take care of something they need done. Geniuses no longer make sense because specialization is made possible by cheap communication.
Lastly, there's one idea we can cross off the list of possible explanations -- that geniuses only flourish while there's "low-hanging fruit," so that one person could pick fruit from a number of different trees. Once that's gone, intellectuals have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees, and that requires spending most of your life climbing a single tree rather than dilly-dallying around the entire orchard. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit. If it were so low-hanging, why did it take the appearance of someone with a 3000 IQ like Newton to pick it? So-called basic calculus could not have been discovered by schoolchildren in math class. If it were so low-hanging, why didn't it repeatedly smack all previous mathematicians in the face as they were wandering around the orchard? Quite obviously, geometry, algebra, calculus, etc., are stratospherically high-hanging fruit.
The true function of the low-hanging fruit story is to massage our egos when we realize that we're in an intellectually stagnant or even backward time -- it can't be that we're stupid or lacking imagination... it's just that... well, all that baby stuff like differential geometry's pretty much been taken care of, leaving little left for us would-be geniuses to solve. That story sounds fine and pretty during a period of slow growth, but we keep seeing those periods interrupted by revolutions. After Euclid wrote The Elements, what was there left to do in geometry? Indeed, his book was the main textbook for centuries until people took geometry in different directions -- and that wasn't low-hanging non-Euclidean fruit either.
Also, this account isn't as rosy as it may sound -- like, great, we don't have to rely on geniuses anymore! The trouble is that when a bunch of ideas are bouncing around in a single person's brain, compared to the loss-y process of bouncing your ideas off of someone else, you can see the larger pattern more easily. It's true that even Newton will need to chat with others, but there does seem to be a critical threshold of how much work you're doing by yourself. Above that threshold, the big work is done by geniuses -- and it's a lot more important than when it's done by hives of specialists. Our contemporary research team arrangement hasn't yielded anything like Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, Einstein, or von Neumann.
Still, the sciences aren't doing so bad -- the loss of geniuses is even worse in the arts. There, the tasks that make up an intellectual project are even more poorly defined and unpredictable. For one thing, there's not really a problem you're trying to crack but rather an impression or viewpoint you're trying to convey to an audience. And the end-result is much more of a gestalt thing. Darwin's Origin of the Species would've been a more difficult read if a committee of biologists investigated and wrote up separate chapters of it, but you'd still walk away with the same knowledge. But imagine a committee of composers each responsible for separate movements of a piece of music. How it all hangs together is far more important in art, making the cost of teamwork prohibitive.
Now in our age of cheap communication, artists form "circles" or "movements" where the tasks are contracted out to lots of members and followers, not unlike research teams in science. Again, it's not as though Shakespeare and Bach never talked to anyone else, but most of their work was done in-house rather than spread out across a clique of specialists. Here there are also very real costs of contracting, aside from just communication -- an artistic circle, movement, or whatever, requires that its adherents waste a bunch of time and brainpower drawing up a manifesto. How different is that from a contract between a plumber and someone with a clogged toilet? If you're Michelangelo, you don't have to set down a more-or-less binding agreement about where the project is headed -- you make those continual re-adjustments yourself as you go along.
In case you think I'm making this whole thing up, look at the two recent cases of mathematicians who solved long-standing Big Problems. Andrew Wiles basically locked himself in a room for several years in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and Grigori Perelman lives nearly isolated from the outside world but still managed to prove the Poincare Conjecture. I'm not nearly as au courant on the arts, but I'll bet that the exceptions amidst the stinking stew of contemporary literature, music, and visual art are those who insulate themselves from the world of circles, movements, and manifestos. That certainly seems true for film-makers -- most of Stanley Kubrick's or David Lynch's movies are better than the doctrinaire hive junk, for example. Art buffs, feel free to leave comments on this question.
But Coase saw that even using the market carried its own costs, called transactions costs. For example, if the tasks you needed someone to do weren't so predictable, you would have to keep re-writing the terms of the contract in the free market. That could waste lots of your time and eat up money if you had to pay fees to lawyers who re-wrote the contract. In this case, it could be less costly to hire that person as a worker for your firm and pay them not for micro-specific tasks but to simply show up and do what their manager says. This allows greater flexibility in having that worker do what you need them to do.
So, the basic idea is that if it costs too much to use the free market, firms will develop and have lots of tasks done "in-house." If it didn't cost anything to use the free market, firms would start shrinking by outsourcing various tasks to independent contractors who they wouldn't have to micro-manage. Here is a straightforward and lively podcast about the nature of the firm from EconTalk.
I think we see something similar in scientific and artistic accomplishment. In some eras, there are geniuses -- individuals who excel at all manner of intellectual tasks -- and in others there are legions of specialists working together. At first you might think the analogy is to free trade: when there are substantial barriers to trade, you won't specialize so much in what you produce because you can't exploit your comparative advantage and because the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. During Descartes' day, this argument would go, there were something like high trade barriers between him and other intellectuals, so Descartes and his contemporaries would lean more in the generalist direction. Now that those barriers are diminished, intellectuals can specialize much more narrowly, and so we don't have geniuses but research teams.
The main barriers to "trading" your output with someone else -- I'll take geometry and you take algebra -- were communication costs. I don't mean just the language barrier, since you can decide on a lingua franca like Latin or English. But being able to bounce your ideas off of other people, give feedback to them, and so on, surely proceeded much more slowly when communication was sent by primitive vs. advanced post systems, let alone when it is sent by telegraph, telephone, or email.
Do these seem like the typical trade barriers? Not really. When we talk about more free vs. less free trade, we're talking more about tariffs, embargoes, and whatnot. If the main reason that Newton couldn't instantly communicate with Leibniz was that there was an aroused populace and a bunch of lawmakers who required him to give up one of his fingers each time he received an article from Leibniz, then the trade analogy would be apt.
Instead, the barrier seems more like a transaction cost, just as you would have to make by meeting with a contractor, communicating back and forth about what the terms of the contract will be, and so on. "OK, I'll take this part of the project, and you work on that other part. We'll keep in touch and update our responsibilities as the project unfolds." How an intellectual work will develop is incredibly unpredictable, so these two free-market transactors are going to have to interact very frequently and keep changing their picture of what each one is going to do until the next interaction.
If the problem looks more like one of transaction costs than of trade barriers, then we should look to Coase's idea about why firms exist. In the 17th C., the constant back-and-forth would have proven too costly, not just financially (before postage, telephones, and email were widespread and cheap) but also in terms of time waiting to hear back, which you could spend doing your own thing. So, rather than contract an intellectual task out to someone else, you'd move it "in-house" and work on it yourself. You'd be a one-person intellectual firm. (As far as I can tell, Coase's idea about the firm just applies to bundling tasks together in an operation, not necessarily a bunch of individual people.)
But if the transaction costs were trivial, as they became during the Industrial Revolution and as they have plummeted even further during the Internet Age, you'd feel the relief of crossing off that task from the long list of shit you already have to do, and let someone else take care of it, provided you take care of something they need done. Geniuses no longer make sense because specialization is made possible by cheap communication.
Lastly, there's one idea we can cross off the list of possible explanations -- that geniuses only flourish while there's "low-hanging fruit," so that one person could pick fruit from a number of different trees. Once that's gone, intellectuals have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees, and that requires spending most of your life climbing a single tree rather than dilly-dallying around the entire orchard. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit. If it were so low-hanging, why did it take the appearance of someone with a 3000 IQ like Newton to pick it? So-called basic calculus could not have been discovered by schoolchildren in math class. If it were so low-hanging, why didn't it repeatedly smack all previous mathematicians in the face as they were wandering around the orchard? Quite obviously, geometry, algebra, calculus, etc., are stratospherically high-hanging fruit.
The true function of the low-hanging fruit story is to massage our egos when we realize that we're in an intellectually stagnant or even backward time -- it can't be that we're stupid or lacking imagination... it's just that... well, all that baby stuff like differential geometry's pretty much been taken care of, leaving little left for us would-be geniuses to solve. That story sounds fine and pretty during a period of slow growth, but we keep seeing those periods interrupted by revolutions. After Euclid wrote The Elements, what was there left to do in geometry? Indeed, his book was the main textbook for centuries until people took geometry in different directions -- and that wasn't low-hanging non-Euclidean fruit either.
Also, this account isn't as rosy as it may sound -- like, great, we don't have to rely on geniuses anymore! The trouble is that when a bunch of ideas are bouncing around in a single person's brain, compared to the loss-y process of bouncing your ideas off of someone else, you can see the larger pattern more easily. It's true that even Newton will need to chat with others, but there does seem to be a critical threshold of how much work you're doing by yourself. Above that threshold, the big work is done by geniuses -- and it's a lot more important than when it's done by hives of specialists. Our contemporary research team arrangement hasn't yielded anything like Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, Einstein, or von Neumann.
Still, the sciences aren't doing so bad -- the loss of geniuses is even worse in the arts. There, the tasks that make up an intellectual project are even more poorly defined and unpredictable. For one thing, there's not really a problem you're trying to crack but rather an impression or viewpoint you're trying to convey to an audience. And the end-result is much more of a gestalt thing. Darwin's Origin of the Species would've been a more difficult read if a committee of biologists investigated and wrote up separate chapters of it, but you'd still walk away with the same knowledge. But imagine a committee of composers each responsible for separate movements of a piece of music. How it all hangs together is far more important in art, making the cost of teamwork prohibitive.
Now in our age of cheap communication, artists form "circles" or "movements" where the tasks are contracted out to lots of members and followers, not unlike research teams in science. Again, it's not as though Shakespeare and Bach never talked to anyone else, but most of their work was done in-house rather than spread out across a clique of specialists. Here there are also very real costs of contracting, aside from just communication -- an artistic circle, movement, or whatever, requires that its adherents waste a bunch of time and brainpower drawing up a manifesto. How different is that from a contract between a plumber and someone with a clogged toilet? If you're Michelangelo, you don't have to set down a more-or-less binding agreement about where the project is headed -- you make those continual re-adjustments yourself as you go along.
In case you think I'm making this whole thing up, look at the two recent cases of mathematicians who solved long-standing Big Problems. Andrew Wiles basically locked himself in a room for several years in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and Grigori Perelman lives nearly isolated from the outside world but still managed to prove the Poincare Conjecture. I'm not nearly as au courant on the arts, but I'll bet that the exceptions amidst the stinking stew of contemporary literature, music, and visual art are those who insulate themselves from the world of circles, movements, and manifestos. That certainly seems true for film-makers -- most of Stanley Kubrick's or David Lynch's movies are better than the doctrinaire hive junk, for example. Art buffs, feel free to leave comments on this question.
October 17, 2009
Putting girls in their place
God knows we love young girls' throbbing energy level and cockiness -- it makes them more fun to be around -- but that testosterone peak sometimes leads them to act out of line. We can always rely on females to police other females' behavior, but that only goes so far. After all, the target of the policing realizes that most of her persecutors are acting selfishly -- omiGOD, i mean, like, don't be JEALOUS just cuz you're old and ugly. She won't conclude that she's done something wrong, only something threatening to the status of competitor females in the mating arena.
That's where feedback from boys comes in. She won't care if a low-ranking boy calls her out for misbehaving, for the same reason as before -- i mean, are you kidding me? you're just JEALOUS that i'm hot and you're a loser. Such guys aren't likely to call her out in the first place because they're pussies, but even if they did, the most likely cause is resentment. And her male relatives have selfish motives too -- to get the best value out of what they see as their property.
This makes it all the more important for desirable males to whip girls into shape whenever they get out of control. First, they are less likely to call acceptable acts "misbehavior" because they aren't competing with the girl, aren't bitter or resentful -- they have enough choices that one girl isn't a drop in the bucket -- and have no genetic stake in how she behaves. Ideally this would be her boyfriend or husband, but even they may not step up enough because they'll incur a higher cost in the form of a potential strain on the relationship's harmony.
I used to do my part for the greater good of humanity by keeping young, cocky girls in line when they were my tutorees. To them, most of the time I was like their friend's cool, cute older brother. If they lost my respect, they'd feel sick showing their face where I work, and that put a real brake on their impulse to act like wild animals. Again, rambunctiousness is healthy to a certain extent, especially when you're young, so I only put my foot down when they stepped too close to the boundary.
Now that I no longer have that outlet, I have to rely on my interactions with them at dance clubs. Most of the time, they're somewhat out of control, but they aren't carrying on like maniacs. Once more, the only parties who would be deeply disturbed are male relatives, bitter loser males, and all manner of competitor females -- especially the older ones, who don't like being reminded of how slack their skin has become and how close their libido and energy level in general is to flatlining. But every once in awhile, they do act like retards and need to be corrected -- for their own benefit and for the well-being of everyone around them.
At '80s night this week, there was the usual circle of groupies staring up while I was getting into the groove, and as usual a few climbed up on the mini-stage to get closer. But instead of delivering a lame pick-up line or just going right for it and grinding their pelvis against my body, one girl gave me a light kick to the calf -- and when my back was turned. Given how crowded the place is, and given how much people are bouncing around, I thought it was an honest mistake. But then she gave me another light kick like the first one, and shot me a come-hither look when I turned around to see what the fuck she was doing.
I paced slowly over to her, set my hand down on her shoulder, and said, "Don't... Do that... Anymore..." I didn't have a scowl on my face, nor a coddling or reassuring expression. Just that look like, you're being annoying and need to knock it off. She stopped horsing around at that point, and when she was about to leave the area 10 minutes later, she tugged at my jeans from the floor and reached up to shake my hand and say i'm sorryyyyy with an honest worried look in her eyes. I took her hand but merely half-smiled and waved her off as though she were overreacting and being weird, which must have fucked with her mind a little more.
The next time she feels like being too aggressive with a boy she likes, she'll remember how ashamed she came out of it the last time. Girls get away with too much shit, and someone needs to rein them in when they push the limits of appropriate behavior. Accosting a boy that you're ga-ga over is one thing, but kicking -- even lightly -- is another. Now, playfully bumping into me -- oooops, i mean, i guess i'm just clumsy -- would have been OK. And I certainly don't mind when a group of them rushes up and gooses me -- believe me, that'll put lead in your pencil. But unless someone is there to give her negative feedback, how will she learn where the borders are?
Now in fairness, she may go to a girls-only high school and so might have had little feedback from boys during her adolescence so far about what's normal in pursuing them. Elementary school girls punch, kick, or push down the boys they have a crush on, but we expect that to stop as boys' feedback to her trial-and-error approach teaches her that that's not acceptable. She definitely wasn't drunk or hyped up on caffeine, so she really did have the wrong view of how to act.
The only alternative to going to a girls-only school is that boys her age are too desperate and afraid to call her out on her bullshit. You don't have that much bargaining power at that age, while the girl who sits in front of you in math class can wrap any guy around her finger, and that makes confronting them pretty intimidating. Even the most popular guy in school still pays a higher social cost, or takes a larger risk, compared to when he's more mature and secure socially. And she was pretty cute, which makes it even harder for guys to suck it up and crack down when necessary.
This is one unfortunate consequence of a greater degree of age segregation in society. All groups split up somewhat by age, but ours especially does so. Parents -- let alone adults with no children -- are pretty clueless about what young people are up to, and this naturally leads to paranoia and moral panics. Video game violence, goth music, an epidemic of oral sex, etc.
But the other side of this coin is that young people are more clueless than before about what real life is like. If the only males you interact with are also young, you're very unlikely to ever get smacked down when you mouth off. More experienced guys, by contrast, don't believe that you have something they've never seen before, or that it's too risky to tell a pretty girl that she's acting retarded. Again, she wouldn't care at all what most older guys thought, for good reasons that we've already covered. But there is that subset of "my friend's cool older brother," or rebellious actors or lead singers, and so on, who they're deathly afraid of pissing off.
In all societies, people will fragment enough by age that these encounters will be rare, but like earthquakes, even a rare event will leave an indelible impression if its shock is great enough. By shielding them from the harsh events of the real world, we give them an artificially high sense of invincibility, and as a result, they'll behave more recklessly. Now, this doesn't translate into higher rates of crime or promiscuity -- the things we tend to worry about first -- because the costs there are mostly in the form of state punishment or same-age social shaming. Still, having to live more in adult-world would temper their conviction that they're the shit and that they can act as obnoxiously as they please.
That's where feedback from boys comes in. She won't care if a low-ranking boy calls her out for misbehaving, for the same reason as before -- i mean, are you kidding me? you're just JEALOUS that i'm hot and you're a loser. Such guys aren't likely to call her out in the first place because they're pussies, but even if they did, the most likely cause is resentment. And her male relatives have selfish motives too -- to get the best value out of what they see as their property.
This makes it all the more important for desirable males to whip girls into shape whenever they get out of control. First, they are less likely to call acceptable acts "misbehavior" because they aren't competing with the girl, aren't bitter or resentful -- they have enough choices that one girl isn't a drop in the bucket -- and have no genetic stake in how she behaves. Ideally this would be her boyfriend or husband, but even they may not step up enough because they'll incur a higher cost in the form of a potential strain on the relationship's harmony.
I used to do my part for the greater good of humanity by keeping young, cocky girls in line when they were my tutorees. To them, most of the time I was like their friend's cool, cute older brother. If they lost my respect, they'd feel sick showing their face where I work, and that put a real brake on their impulse to act like wild animals. Again, rambunctiousness is healthy to a certain extent, especially when you're young, so I only put my foot down when they stepped too close to the boundary.
Now that I no longer have that outlet, I have to rely on my interactions with them at dance clubs. Most of the time, they're somewhat out of control, but they aren't carrying on like maniacs. Once more, the only parties who would be deeply disturbed are male relatives, bitter loser males, and all manner of competitor females -- especially the older ones, who don't like being reminded of how slack their skin has become and how close their libido and energy level in general is to flatlining. But every once in awhile, they do act like retards and need to be corrected -- for their own benefit and for the well-being of everyone around them.
At '80s night this week, there was the usual circle of groupies staring up while I was getting into the groove, and as usual a few climbed up on the mini-stage to get closer. But instead of delivering a lame pick-up line or just going right for it and grinding their pelvis against my body, one girl gave me a light kick to the calf -- and when my back was turned. Given how crowded the place is, and given how much people are bouncing around, I thought it was an honest mistake. But then she gave me another light kick like the first one, and shot me a come-hither look when I turned around to see what the fuck she was doing.
I paced slowly over to her, set my hand down on her shoulder, and said, "Don't... Do that... Anymore..." I didn't have a scowl on my face, nor a coddling or reassuring expression. Just that look like, you're being annoying and need to knock it off. She stopped horsing around at that point, and when she was about to leave the area 10 minutes later, she tugged at my jeans from the floor and reached up to shake my hand and say i'm sorryyyyy with an honest worried look in her eyes. I took her hand but merely half-smiled and waved her off as though she were overreacting and being weird, which must have fucked with her mind a little more.
The next time she feels like being too aggressive with a boy she likes, she'll remember how ashamed she came out of it the last time. Girls get away with too much shit, and someone needs to rein them in when they push the limits of appropriate behavior. Accosting a boy that you're ga-ga over is one thing, but kicking -- even lightly -- is another. Now, playfully bumping into me -- oooops, i mean, i guess i'm just clumsy -- would have been OK. And I certainly don't mind when a group of them rushes up and gooses me -- believe me, that'll put lead in your pencil. But unless someone is there to give her negative feedback, how will she learn where the borders are?
Now in fairness, she may go to a girls-only high school and so might have had little feedback from boys during her adolescence so far about what's normal in pursuing them. Elementary school girls punch, kick, or push down the boys they have a crush on, but we expect that to stop as boys' feedback to her trial-and-error approach teaches her that that's not acceptable. She definitely wasn't drunk or hyped up on caffeine, so she really did have the wrong view of how to act.
The only alternative to going to a girls-only school is that boys her age are too desperate and afraid to call her out on her bullshit. You don't have that much bargaining power at that age, while the girl who sits in front of you in math class can wrap any guy around her finger, and that makes confronting them pretty intimidating. Even the most popular guy in school still pays a higher social cost, or takes a larger risk, compared to when he's more mature and secure socially. And she was pretty cute, which makes it even harder for guys to suck it up and crack down when necessary.
This is one unfortunate consequence of a greater degree of age segregation in society. All groups split up somewhat by age, but ours especially does so. Parents -- let alone adults with no children -- are pretty clueless about what young people are up to, and this naturally leads to paranoia and moral panics. Video game violence, goth music, an epidemic of oral sex, etc.
But the other side of this coin is that young people are more clueless than before about what real life is like. If the only males you interact with are also young, you're very unlikely to ever get smacked down when you mouth off. More experienced guys, by contrast, don't believe that you have something they've never seen before, or that it's too risky to tell a pretty girl that she's acting retarded. Again, she wouldn't care at all what most older guys thought, for good reasons that we've already covered. But there is that subset of "my friend's cool older brother," or rebellious actors or lead singers, and so on, who they're deathly afraid of pissing off.
In all societies, people will fragment enough by age that these encounters will be rare, but like earthquakes, even a rare event will leave an indelible impression if its shock is great enough. By shielding them from the harsh events of the real world, we give them an artificially high sense of invincibility, and as a result, they'll behave more recklessly. Now, this doesn't translate into higher rates of crime or promiscuity -- the things we tend to worry about first -- because the costs there are mostly in the form of state punishment or same-age social shaming. Still, having to live more in adult-world would temper their conviction that they're the shit and that they can act as obnoxiously as they please.
October 13, 2009
Small farmers, not big corporations, gouge consumers
Recently I pointed out how backwards were the complaints about the large corporate buyers of farmers' raw milk being "too big" and supposedly wielding their buying power to fleece people who like dairy products. In fact, it's the dairy farmers themselves -- not those who buy up the raw milk and distribute it elsewhere -- who are trying to take the consumer for a ride.
The basic way that a monopoly harms consumers is by restricting output in order to send prices skyrocketing. Imagine when De Beers controlled almost all of the world's diamonds -- if prices were to fall unexpectedly, they'd simply choke off the supply. With fewer diamonds available, consumers will fight more intensely over them and so drive up the price. By creating an artificial shortage, De Beers makes consumers pay higher prices just so it doesn't bring in less money.
Unlike De Beers stuffing diamonds in their sock drawer, though, dairy farmers would have to pay huge costs to maintain cows that they'd taken out of milk production. So they just get rid of them altogether (from this WSJ article)
There you have it. Right in the pages of the newspaper with the widest U.S. circulation, we have an open-and-shut case of a group colluding to restrict its output in order to push prices back up to where they'd like them to be. For god's sake, they don't even break the law behind closed doors -- they've established the anti-competitive Cooperatives Working Together in plain view!
Of course, since they're farmers, they're not "gouging consumers" or "breaking the law" but merely struggling to preserve their endangered habitat. You can imagine the reaction if McDonalds and Starbucks saw their prices dropping due to the coffee war competition and agreed to destroy fully 2% of their coffee output so that they could charge higher prices for the remainder. Ditto if Wal-Mart and Target colluded. Actually, the elites would give Target a pass because they bring edgy designer junk to those who could otherwise only afford tacky crap. *
With most layers of government strapped for cash, the best policy response here is to shutter the DoJ's Antitrust division and have these glorified hall monitor pansies go do something useful.
* BTW, looks like the word "edgy" isn't so edgy anymore. One last slang-tastic paroxysm from the euphoric culture before it tumbled over like a drunk into a sewer.
The basic way that a monopoly harms consumers is by restricting output in order to send prices skyrocketing. Imagine when De Beers controlled almost all of the world's diamonds -- if prices were to fall unexpectedly, they'd simply choke off the supply. With fewer diamonds available, consumers will fight more intensely over them and so drive up the price. By creating an artificial shortage, De Beers makes consumers pay higher prices just so it doesn't bring in less money.
Unlike De Beers stuffing diamonds in their sock drawer, though, dairy farmers would have to pay huge costs to maintain cows that they'd taken out of milk production. So they just get rid of them altogether (from this WSJ article)
[L]ow prices have forced farmers to sell dairy cows through an industry program called Cooperatives Working Together. Member farms contribute money to the program, which purchases cows and slaughters them. So far this year, the number of working dairy cows in the U.S. has fallen by 170,000 to 9.2 million, says industry expert Jerry Dryer.
There you have it. Right in the pages of the newspaper with the widest U.S. circulation, we have an open-and-shut case of a group colluding to restrict its output in order to push prices back up to where they'd like them to be. For god's sake, they don't even break the law behind closed doors -- they've established the anti-competitive Cooperatives Working Together in plain view!
Of course, since they're farmers, they're not "gouging consumers" or "breaking the law" but merely struggling to preserve their endangered habitat. You can imagine the reaction if McDonalds and Starbucks saw their prices dropping due to the coffee war competition and agreed to destroy fully 2% of their coffee output so that they could charge higher prices for the remainder. Ditto if Wal-Mart and Target colluded. Actually, the elites would give Target a pass because they bring edgy designer junk to those who could otherwise only afford tacky crap. *
With most layers of government strapped for cash, the best policy response here is to shutter the DoJ's Antitrust division and have these glorified hall monitor pansies go do something useful.
* BTW, looks like the word "edgy" isn't so edgy anymore. One last slang-tastic paroxysm from the euphoric culture before it tumbled over like a drunk into a sewer.
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