The 2009 results of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey came out this week, and as I predicted here they show that wild behavior is either what it was in 2007 or lower. For most things like sex, violence, and vehicle safety, that makes nearly 20 years of decline in how wild high schoolers are. (Drug use started declining in the late '90s.)
Flipping through the statistics, the largest change I see from 2007 and indeed throughout the past 20 years is cigarette smoking. In 2009, for the first time only a minority of students, 46%, had ever tried smoking -- even one or two puffs -- down from 70% in 1991. We're in a different world from "Smokin' In the Boys Room."
During the past 20 years of safe times, STDs rose faster among Baby Boomers than young people, and they certainly smoke more than young people too. I'll bet they are more likely to play in a band too, even if it's just a local bar on Wednesday nights. Crime is still a youth thing, but it's one that hardly any young people actually engage in, so that's not going to save the "wild and crazy kids" image. College freshmen typically don't have driver's licenses and spend most of their time under self-imposed house arrest playing video games, while 50-somethings are at least out and doing something. Has there ever been another time in human existence when it was the middle-aged who were more out-of-control than the teenagers?
June 5, 2010
June 3, 2010
Violent societies make more desirable women
Previously we noted the lack of sweetheart types among female celebrities during safe times vs. their abundance during dangerous times. When you perceive the world as coming closer and closer to exploding, you put more effort into courtship and mating while you still can. And if you want to snag a quality guy quickly, you can't act like an ice queen. You have to be warm and energetic and in general turn up that feminine charm.
That suggests a way for guys who live in societies with falling crime rates to find sweetheart types -- pick girls from a more violent society. Think of where in the world the average American guy would choose a bride from if not from his own country. Got a few ideas? OK, have a look at this recent ranking of countries by homicide rate. It's not a perfect match, but I'll bet it was pretty close to your guess.
The match is not due to poverty or average attractiveness, since there are plenty of poor countries with good-looking women and similar geographical location and racial make-up, but that aren't as likely to show up in the "most sought after foreign bride" list. (And Russia is not exactly like Burundi in GDP.) For example, the lists are typically dominated by the violent Eastern Slavic and Baltic countries, where the homicide rate is now what it last was around 1600 in England and Germany. By contrast, it's less common to see the Western and Southern Slavic countries or other less developed parts of Central Europe, which are like the U.S. in the homicide rate.
I've never been to Poland or the former Czechoslovakian region, but people who have say how great the women look -- and yet not how spellbindingly feminine and sweet they are. (I hear the opposite about Czech girls.) I always hear about sweetheartedness, though, when they're talking about women from the Eastern Slavic and Baltic countries. In fact, when my father re-married several years ago, it was to a tall blonde from Lithuania, and the real appeal to him was how girly her personality was. Every time I meet her, it really is like being around a more grown-up version of a bubbly teenage girl.
This also shows that it's not some legacy of communism, since those left-out countries were also communist. Most of the Latin American sources of sought-after brides haven't been communist either.
I don't buy the argument that says that women from violent societies are just pretending to be more feminine, etc., out of desperation -- like, whatever will get a potential rescuer's attention, she'll plan it out and execute it. Certainly women weren't behaving that way from the '60s through the '80s here. Because it looks like the world's falling apart, they just naturally get into a more fragile and vulnerable state of mind, and they are more easily overcome by the desire to find someone to hold on to and make some babies with before everything blows up. This can go too far when the girl becomes neurotic and clingy, but overall this direction is the right one to head in if you want to win a guy over, not the direction toward emotional numbness and aloofness. That's why teenage girls -- the ones in the thick of the struggle to win guys over -- give you that puppy dog look and come crashing into your arms, rather than talk your ear off about how milquetoast their Thai sushi latte was today.
That suggests a way for guys who live in societies with falling crime rates to find sweetheart types -- pick girls from a more violent society. Think of where in the world the average American guy would choose a bride from if not from his own country. Got a few ideas? OK, have a look at this recent ranking of countries by homicide rate. It's not a perfect match, but I'll bet it was pretty close to your guess.
The match is not due to poverty or average attractiveness, since there are plenty of poor countries with good-looking women and similar geographical location and racial make-up, but that aren't as likely to show up in the "most sought after foreign bride" list. (And Russia is not exactly like Burundi in GDP.) For example, the lists are typically dominated by the violent Eastern Slavic and Baltic countries, where the homicide rate is now what it last was around 1600 in England and Germany. By contrast, it's less common to see the Western and Southern Slavic countries or other less developed parts of Central Europe, which are like the U.S. in the homicide rate.
I've never been to Poland or the former Czechoslovakian region, but people who have say how great the women look -- and yet not how spellbindingly feminine and sweet they are. (I hear the opposite about Czech girls.) I always hear about sweetheartedness, though, when they're talking about women from the Eastern Slavic and Baltic countries. In fact, when my father re-married several years ago, it was to a tall blonde from Lithuania, and the real appeal to him was how girly her personality was. Every time I meet her, it really is like being around a more grown-up version of a bubbly teenage girl.
This also shows that it's not some legacy of communism, since those left-out countries were also communist. Most of the Latin American sources of sought-after brides haven't been communist either.
I don't buy the argument that says that women from violent societies are just pretending to be more feminine, etc., out of desperation -- like, whatever will get a potential rescuer's attention, she'll plan it out and execute it. Certainly women weren't behaving that way from the '60s through the '80s here. Because it looks like the world's falling apart, they just naturally get into a more fragile and vulnerable state of mind, and they are more easily overcome by the desire to find someone to hold on to and make some babies with before everything blows up. This can go too far when the girl becomes neurotic and clingy, but overall this direction is the right one to head in if you want to win a guy over, not the direction toward emotional numbness and aloofness. That's why teenage girls -- the ones in the thick of the struggle to win guys over -- give you that puppy dog look and come crashing into your arms, rather than talk your ear off about how milquetoast their Thai sushi latte was today.
June 2, 2010
History in one picture: 150 years of Good whites dissing Bad whites
While messing around with the NYT's search function, I was surprised to find out how far back the slur "white trash" goes; Wikipedia says at least back to 1830. Supposedly it began among black slaves, but obviously they were not writing the NYT articles where it shows up. Rather, the Good white people adopted it to disparage the Bad white people. Because it goes back so far, we can use its prevalence in the newspaper of record to see how intra-white tribal warfare has changed over time. * Here are the results (click to enlarge):
I did this before (with finer resolution) for the prevalence of the slur "nigger" in the NYT. The two graphs look almost identical as far as upward or downward swings. This is because when racial tensions flare up (as measured by how often "nigger" appears), the Good whites want to make it clear that they're not Bad whites, who they must then publicly cast out of the tent of white people.
There is one large exception to this close correspondence, though: the graph for racial tensions shows a decline from the second half of the '90s through today, whereas the graph for slamming Bad whites shows a continued increase from the early '90s through today. This confirms the larger picture that people have put together about polarization increasing during roughly the past 20 years, although typically they're talking about political parties. Apparently it extends more broadly to conflict between Good vs. Bad white people.
For most of American history, Good whites were dissing Bad whites for having backward views about blacks. Now that there's so little racism left, though, Good whites cannot use that as their ammunition, so intra-white conflict doesn't track white-black conflict as before. Now white trash people are mocked not for backward views about race, but for the entirety of what sets them apart as a separate tribe from Good whites -- their hairstyles, music, clothing, cars, slang and accent, interior design concepts, etc. In fact, the more specific slur "trailer trash" only appears in the NYT in 1992 and has grown since.
By the way, there's no clear relation between racial tensions -- either black-white or intra-white -- and the homicide rate. I would've expected dangerous times to lessen intra-white conflict because they feel the need to come together against a common enemy (as after 9/11), and safe times to allow white tribes to indulge in tiresome squabbling (like the past 20 years). But the ups and downs in racial tensions don't match those of the homicide rate. Rather than white racial solidarity being tied to the danger level, it's probably something like patriotism or nationalism instead that responds to danger.
* The data points are from 5-year blocks, the first and second halves of each decade, and they are plotted by the middle year of the block. So one data point is for the 1990-1994 block, and it shows up under 1992.
I did this before (with finer resolution) for the prevalence of the slur "nigger" in the NYT. The two graphs look almost identical as far as upward or downward swings. This is because when racial tensions flare up (as measured by how often "nigger" appears), the Good whites want to make it clear that they're not Bad whites, who they must then publicly cast out of the tent of white people.
There is one large exception to this close correspondence, though: the graph for racial tensions shows a decline from the second half of the '90s through today, whereas the graph for slamming Bad whites shows a continued increase from the early '90s through today. This confirms the larger picture that people have put together about polarization increasing during roughly the past 20 years, although typically they're talking about political parties. Apparently it extends more broadly to conflict between Good vs. Bad white people.
For most of American history, Good whites were dissing Bad whites for having backward views about blacks. Now that there's so little racism left, though, Good whites cannot use that as their ammunition, so intra-white conflict doesn't track white-black conflict as before. Now white trash people are mocked not for backward views about race, but for the entirety of what sets them apart as a separate tribe from Good whites -- their hairstyles, music, clothing, cars, slang and accent, interior design concepts, etc. In fact, the more specific slur "trailer trash" only appears in the NYT in 1992 and has grown since.
By the way, there's no clear relation between racial tensions -- either black-white or intra-white -- and the homicide rate. I would've expected dangerous times to lessen intra-white conflict because they feel the need to come together against a common enemy (as after 9/11), and safe times to allow white tribes to indulge in tiresome squabbling (like the past 20 years). But the ups and downs in racial tensions don't match those of the homicide rate. Rather than white racial solidarity being tied to the danger level, it's probably something like patriotism or nationalism instead that responds to danger.
* The data points are from 5-year blocks, the first and second halves of each decade, and they are plotted by the middle year of the block. So one data point is for the 1990-1994 block, and it shows up under 1992.
June 1, 2010
The role of voice in attracting mates
You can reasonably guess a person's age just by listening to their voice: the older someone is, the more likely they are to have little variation in their inflection and speed, whereas the speech of younger people mixes these up. They even try to recreate this variability in writing --
This sing-song quality may have evolved in infants in order to make the parents and other adults involved in cooperative breeding pay attention to the child. As helpless creatures, infants have only their cuteness to wield in getting others to do their bidding. Still, after awhile children stop babbling, and at puberty they stop being cute altogether to their parents. If juvenile traits are retained into adulthood, it is not in order to manipulate child-rearers but to attract mates (or perhaps to join a band of unrelated allies, if they would view someone with too-mature traits as a potential usurper / dictator).
That in turn allows us to see when females (or males) are designed to wander around the mating market. Girls retain the wrinkle-free skin of small children for many years after puberty, but at some point -- I'd guess in the mid-20s -- their bodies draw resources out of skin maintenance. Ditto for maintaining a more juvenile facial appearance, which becomes more mannish. We should expect the same to happen to the fast-and-slow rhythm and the lolly-lolly inflection of their voices.
I did some googling for "vocal inflection" and "age" but didn't find anything right away. It's hard to compare people from different ages because you really want to hear them within the same time and setting, rather than rely on your potentially biased memory, and there aren't that many places where age groups mix these days. One exception is Starbucks, where you find small children, adolescents, young adults, and every decade-group above. During my daily leisure reading break, I hear lots of these people ordering, talking to each other, and yakking into their cell phones. Of course I don't know any of their ages exactly, but there is a pretty consistent decline in vocal cuteness as they hit their mid-20s. You can accurately ballpark their ages because their clothes, accessories, and conversation topics reflect the life of a 20-something professional who's settled into some after-college job.
You'd think the decline would be gradual, but I find it's a pretty sharp drop-off from sing-song to flat metronomic snapping, with women in their later 20s sounding scarcely more feminine than 40-somethings. It's just as rapid as the earlier transition from babbling to no babbling. This suggests that it's not a gradual wear-and-tear process, whereby the parts used for vocal gymnastics just get rustier over time. It's more like a switch is thrown, which means that it's intended by the body's design plan. In this case a female's cuteness is switched off because she should have already found a mate and be in the process of raising a family by her mid-20s. Her body is transitioning into a state built for motherhood, which explains why her voice becomes a lot more nagging and barking. After all, her children aren't going to obey her based on how cute she sounds but rather how stern.
Is there a group that uses cuteness to attract mates and yet rarely plans to or is designed to raise a family? If so, we would predict them to maintain sing-song speech well into their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I don't even need to look up to see who it is when I hear something like:
Ummmmm, can i just get aaaaa.... (be quiet ho, i'm trying to order a drink) okayyy, could you like totally be my new bestest friend and get me a java chip frappucino wiiiiith... yeah, with lots of foam. omigod does that make me sound like a slut? whatever, i mean let the haters hate. oops, i'm like totally tying up the line, aren't i? omigod i love you girl, you're my savior today -- thanksssss!
i mean omgicantfreakingbelieveit, spring break is gonna be SO sickkk, i'm not gonna lieeeeee....
tEehEe dOn't wOrry SiLLy, i tHInk aGe iS jUsT a nUmBEr
This sing-song quality may have evolved in infants in order to make the parents and other adults involved in cooperative breeding pay attention to the child. As helpless creatures, infants have only their cuteness to wield in getting others to do their bidding. Still, after awhile children stop babbling, and at puberty they stop being cute altogether to their parents. If juvenile traits are retained into adulthood, it is not in order to manipulate child-rearers but to attract mates (or perhaps to join a band of unrelated allies, if they would view someone with too-mature traits as a potential usurper / dictator).
That in turn allows us to see when females (or males) are designed to wander around the mating market. Girls retain the wrinkle-free skin of small children for many years after puberty, but at some point -- I'd guess in the mid-20s -- their bodies draw resources out of skin maintenance. Ditto for maintaining a more juvenile facial appearance, which becomes more mannish. We should expect the same to happen to the fast-and-slow rhythm and the lolly-lolly inflection of their voices.
I did some googling for "vocal inflection" and "age" but didn't find anything right away. It's hard to compare people from different ages because you really want to hear them within the same time and setting, rather than rely on your potentially biased memory, and there aren't that many places where age groups mix these days. One exception is Starbucks, where you find small children, adolescents, young adults, and every decade-group above. During my daily leisure reading break, I hear lots of these people ordering, talking to each other, and yakking into their cell phones. Of course I don't know any of their ages exactly, but there is a pretty consistent decline in vocal cuteness as they hit their mid-20s. You can accurately ballpark their ages because their clothes, accessories, and conversation topics reflect the life of a 20-something professional who's settled into some after-college job.
You'd think the decline would be gradual, but I find it's a pretty sharp drop-off from sing-song to flat metronomic snapping, with women in their later 20s sounding scarcely more feminine than 40-somethings. It's just as rapid as the earlier transition from babbling to no babbling. This suggests that it's not a gradual wear-and-tear process, whereby the parts used for vocal gymnastics just get rustier over time. It's more like a switch is thrown, which means that it's intended by the body's design plan. In this case a female's cuteness is switched off because she should have already found a mate and be in the process of raising a family by her mid-20s. Her body is transitioning into a state built for motherhood, which explains why her voice becomes a lot more nagging and barking. After all, her children aren't going to obey her based on how cute she sounds but rather how stern.
Is there a group that uses cuteness to attract mates and yet rarely plans to or is designed to raise a family? If so, we would predict them to maintain sing-song speech well into their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I don't even need to look up to see who it is when I hear something like:
Ummmmm, can i just get aaaaa.... (be quiet ho, i'm trying to order a drink) okayyy, could you like totally be my new bestest friend and get me a java chip frappucino wiiiiith... yeah, with lots of foam. omigod does that make me sound like a slut? whatever, i mean let the haters hate. oops, i'm like totally tying up the line, aren't i? omigod i love you girl, you're my savior today -- thanksssss!
May 31, 2010
Unlike other toys, video games belong to a certain generation rather than age group
A new study by market analysts NPD shows that the average video game player is 32, up from 31 last year. That is a dramatic change from the Nintendo days when the audience was mostly pre-pubescent kids. Curious, I searched the NYT for "average age" and "video game," and it turns out that the average video game player is whatever age someone born around 1978 would be at the time of the survey, from 1990 to 2010. This is only for home console game systems like Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation 2, etc. Computer game players tend to be 5 to 10 years older, but still their average age is however old someone born in the late '60s or early '70s would be.
Contrast this with the age profile of people who play with action figures -- their average age stays virtually the same across the decades, somewhere between 5 and 13 I'd guess. If a boy is too young, he doesn't have the motor coordination to manipulate the action figures, and he'd probably get too scared by dragons, monsters, and so on. Once he hits puberty, though, "toys" in general are no longer cool and he turns instead to music and movies.
Thus, action figures stay fairly constant in their basic features, and individuals adopt them or junk them based on changes in their nature throughout the life's stages. Video games, however, adapt themselves to whatever the 1978-born game player would most enjoy; they follow after him throughout life's stages.
For instance, when Nintendo ruled the video game world, games focused mostly on imagination and exploration, true to what a 9 or 11 year-old boy would dig. (He was too young to play a bunch of terrible Atari games in the early '80s and become soured on video games forever as a result.) By the time he turns 15 in 1993, video game developers make games that allow him to pretend he's a badass in an adolescent way -- more cursing, more defiant attitude, getting into bloody fistfights like he wishes he could with the popular guys in high school, etc. Thus is born Mortal Kombat.
When he goes off to college at 18 and begins in earnest to try getting laid, video game makers release Tomb Raider. The protagonist is a butt-kicking babe whose reliable presence consoles him on those many dateless nights. He's also at the age now when he'd think about joining the army to go shoot a bunch of shit up, and so the first-person shooter games begin to proliferate on home consoles with 1997's Goldeneye. (Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were computer games, and recall that computer game players are 5 to 10 years older.)
Throughout the rest of his 20s he still has a taste for shooting people, joining gangs, and committing thrill-seeking crimes. This accounts for the explosion of first-person shooters and play-as-the-criminal games like those of the Grand Theft Auto series during most of the 2000s. For those 15-24 year-old males who prefer daydreaming, the cornucopia of role-playing games in the late '90s through the mid-2000s offered an escape.
Still, as he approaches and then passes 30, his adolescent / young adult taste for psychopathy begins to fade and he thinks about settling down. He starts to complain that "all first-person shooters are the same old boring game," that Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't all it was hyped up to be, and so on, to rationalize his own dwindling taste for psychopathy-oriented games. He now turns more to games that mimic the activities he'd be engaged in if he'd actually bothered to have children, such as go-kart racing, hunting and fishing, sports that can be played in a park, and guitar lessons, mostly available on the family-oriented Wii. And now that he's not young anymore, he tries to keep in shape with fitness "games" -- also on the Wii.
If he had had kids, this is the age during which he'd think about what toys and such to get them, so he naturally recalls the entertainment of his own childhood. Game developers respond by reviving previously dead franchises in the original style that he discovered them in, such as Megaman 9 and 10, or perhaps just made prettier by current technology, such as Bionic Commando Rearmed. An avalanche of classic games that he played as a 10 year-old are re-released for download on current systems, such as the Wii's Virtual Console.
Looking ahead, we can predict a rise in 2020 of golf simulation games, in the '30s of gardening-themed games, and from the '50s onward of virtual reality games where he gets sponge-bathed by large-breasted blonde nurses.
I can't think of another major form of entertainment -- billions of dollars a year in revenue -- that shifts its shapes to so closely match the tastes of a cohort that's at most 3 years wide (about 1977 to 1979). Movies, TV shows, popular music, all have niches that tag along with this cohort or that -- metal reunion tours that cater to increasingly older audiences -- but in no other case does the entire industry attend to a single generation, no matter how old they grow. As long as video game developers can adapt their products to the changing tastes of this cohort, they'll remain profitable. Still, they would become even more profitable if they diversified their audiences to the extent that other industries with niches do. They could still release games that suited the 1978-born game player, but they'd also have a steady schedule of imagination-based games for the large number of 9 year-olds who enter the market every year. Once more Nintendo appears to be leading the charge here with plenty of games on the Wii and especially on the handheld DS designed with children in mind.
Fundamentally video games are toys, and so the best video games will tend to be made when the actual audience for these toys is close to the ideal audience for toys, namely 5 to 13 year-old boys (not girls). Everyone who has experienced video games from the 1980s through today recognizes the period from the mid-'80s through the early-mid-'90s as the golden age. That includes Nintendo, Genesis, Super Nintendo, TurboGrafx, and the arcade games of the same period. The quality of the average video game, regardless of outliers, started to slide once video games were targeted at the audience of adolescent losers and then college-aged shut-ins. The average quality has only tumbled further as they've begun to appeal to men who should be raising a family. If this pattern continues, things will only get worse -- just think of what action figures would look like if the average owner was in his 40s. Worst. Toy. Ever.
Contrast this with the age profile of people who play with action figures -- their average age stays virtually the same across the decades, somewhere between 5 and 13 I'd guess. If a boy is too young, he doesn't have the motor coordination to manipulate the action figures, and he'd probably get too scared by dragons, monsters, and so on. Once he hits puberty, though, "toys" in general are no longer cool and he turns instead to music and movies.
Thus, action figures stay fairly constant in their basic features, and individuals adopt them or junk them based on changes in their nature throughout the life's stages. Video games, however, adapt themselves to whatever the 1978-born game player would most enjoy; they follow after him throughout life's stages.
For instance, when Nintendo ruled the video game world, games focused mostly on imagination and exploration, true to what a 9 or 11 year-old boy would dig. (He was too young to play a bunch of terrible Atari games in the early '80s and become soured on video games forever as a result.) By the time he turns 15 in 1993, video game developers make games that allow him to pretend he's a badass in an adolescent way -- more cursing, more defiant attitude, getting into bloody fistfights like he wishes he could with the popular guys in high school, etc. Thus is born Mortal Kombat.
When he goes off to college at 18 and begins in earnest to try getting laid, video game makers release Tomb Raider. The protagonist is a butt-kicking babe whose reliable presence consoles him on those many dateless nights. He's also at the age now when he'd think about joining the army to go shoot a bunch of shit up, and so the first-person shooter games begin to proliferate on home consoles with 1997's Goldeneye. (Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were computer games, and recall that computer game players are 5 to 10 years older.)
Throughout the rest of his 20s he still has a taste for shooting people, joining gangs, and committing thrill-seeking crimes. This accounts for the explosion of first-person shooters and play-as-the-criminal games like those of the Grand Theft Auto series during most of the 2000s. For those 15-24 year-old males who prefer daydreaming, the cornucopia of role-playing games in the late '90s through the mid-2000s offered an escape.
Still, as he approaches and then passes 30, his adolescent / young adult taste for psychopathy begins to fade and he thinks about settling down. He starts to complain that "all first-person shooters are the same old boring game," that Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't all it was hyped up to be, and so on, to rationalize his own dwindling taste for psychopathy-oriented games. He now turns more to games that mimic the activities he'd be engaged in if he'd actually bothered to have children, such as go-kart racing, hunting and fishing, sports that can be played in a park, and guitar lessons, mostly available on the family-oriented Wii. And now that he's not young anymore, he tries to keep in shape with fitness "games" -- also on the Wii.
If he had had kids, this is the age during which he'd think about what toys and such to get them, so he naturally recalls the entertainment of his own childhood. Game developers respond by reviving previously dead franchises in the original style that he discovered them in, such as Megaman 9 and 10, or perhaps just made prettier by current technology, such as Bionic Commando Rearmed. An avalanche of classic games that he played as a 10 year-old are re-released for download on current systems, such as the Wii's Virtual Console.
Looking ahead, we can predict a rise in 2020 of golf simulation games, in the '30s of gardening-themed games, and from the '50s onward of virtual reality games where he gets sponge-bathed by large-breasted blonde nurses.
I can't think of another major form of entertainment -- billions of dollars a year in revenue -- that shifts its shapes to so closely match the tastes of a cohort that's at most 3 years wide (about 1977 to 1979). Movies, TV shows, popular music, all have niches that tag along with this cohort or that -- metal reunion tours that cater to increasingly older audiences -- but in no other case does the entire industry attend to a single generation, no matter how old they grow. As long as video game developers can adapt their products to the changing tastes of this cohort, they'll remain profitable. Still, they would become even more profitable if they diversified their audiences to the extent that other industries with niches do. They could still release games that suited the 1978-born game player, but they'd also have a steady schedule of imagination-based games for the large number of 9 year-olds who enter the market every year. Once more Nintendo appears to be leading the charge here with plenty of games on the Wii and especially on the handheld DS designed with children in mind.
Fundamentally video games are toys, and so the best video games will tend to be made when the actual audience for these toys is close to the ideal audience for toys, namely 5 to 13 year-old boys (not girls). Everyone who has experienced video games from the 1980s through today recognizes the period from the mid-'80s through the early-mid-'90s as the golden age. That includes Nintendo, Genesis, Super Nintendo, TurboGrafx, and the arcade games of the same period. The quality of the average video game, regardless of outliers, started to slide once video games were targeted at the audience of adolescent losers and then college-aged shut-ins. The average quality has only tumbled further as they've begun to appeal to men who should be raising a family. If this pattern continues, things will only get worse -- just think of what action figures would look like if the average owner was in his 40s. Worst. Toy. Ever.
May 28, 2010
Where does food poisoning really come from?
There's pressure on the USDA to monitor meat for more strains of E. coli than it currently does, lest there be a repeat of the Jack in the Box burger outbreak of 1993. But anyone who actually pays attention to what foods have been recalled for poisoning knows that meat contributes very little, and that this is just more animal-phobic balderdash from the government.
For the most recent year of available data, here is the CDC's press release about food poisoning across different types of food. Ignore the number of outbreaks, since that confuses the obvious difference between an "outbreak" of 3 people and an outbreak of 3,000 people; focus on the number of cases instead. Here is a one-page PDF with all the numbers so you can see how all 17 categories of food contributed.
The leading contributor is poultry, in particular baked poultry that was clearly not cooked long enough or at high enough temperature to kill bacteria. So much for red meat being the main killer, and so much for the superiority of baking to frying. When you bake chicken or turkey, you typically don't carve it up beforehand, so the surface area affected by the heat source is pretty small compared to when you cut up the chicken into pieces before throwing them in some oil in a skillet. And the primary infection that comes from undercooked poultry is C. perfringens, whose symptoms don't sound so bad as far as food poisoning goes.
Just about as common, though, were cases caused by leafy green vegetables and fruits/nuts -- and here we're talking E. coli and Salmonella, respectively. Combining the prevalence and severity of symptoms, plant foods were far more harmful to Americans than poultry was, let alone even more harmless sources like beef, dairy, and eggs. More recently, this month there was a major recall of romaine lettuce products containing E. coli, and the homepage at FoodSafety.gov currently displays a picture warning about Salmonella in alfalfa sprouts.
Were the spinach, peanuts, lettuce, and sprouts responsible for these outbreaks heated long enough and at high enough temperature to kill off bacteria? Of course not -- then they would no longer count as "fresh," the euphemism for "raw" in the context of non-animal vs. animal products. Eating deep-fried alfalfa sprouts would make you look like a weirdo, not the eco-friendly saint that you want to be.
As the numbers show, food poisoning is somewhat rare, with fewer than 1 in 10,000 people affected, although unrecognized cases would drive that estimate up. But if we do consider that rate and the average severity of symptoms to be bad enough that "something must be done," we should remember who the real culprits are. Contrary to vegetarian propaganda, plant foods -- especially those "fresh" kinds we're supposed to eat more of -- are the worst offenders.
For the most recent year of available data, here is the CDC's press release about food poisoning across different types of food. Ignore the number of outbreaks, since that confuses the obvious difference between an "outbreak" of 3 people and an outbreak of 3,000 people; focus on the number of cases instead. Here is a one-page PDF with all the numbers so you can see how all 17 categories of food contributed.
The leading contributor is poultry, in particular baked poultry that was clearly not cooked long enough or at high enough temperature to kill bacteria. So much for red meat being the main killer, and so much for the superiority of baking to frying. When you bake chicken or turkey, you typically don't carve it up beforehand, so the surface area affected by the heat source is pretty small compared to when you cut up the chicken into pieces before throwing them in some oil in a skillet. And the primary infection that comes from undercooked poultry is C. perfringens, whose symptoms don't sound so bad as far as food poisoning goes.
Just about as common, though, were cases caused by leafy green vegetables and fruits/nuts -- and here we're talking E. coli and Salmonella, respectively. Combining the prevalence and severity of symptoms, plant foods were far more harmful to Americans than poultry was, let alone even more harmless sources like beef, dairy, and eggs. More recently, this month there was a major recall of romaine lettuce products containing E. coli, and the homepage at FoodSafety.gov currently displays a picture warning about Salmonella in alfalfa sprouts.
Were the spinach, peanuts, lettuce, and sprouts responsible for these outbreaks heated long enough and at high enough temperature to kill off bacteria? Of course not -- then they would no longer count as "fresh," the euphemism for "raw" in the context of non-animal vs. animal products. Eating deep-fried alfalfa sprouts would make you look like a weirdo, not the eco-friendly saint that you want to be.
As the numbers show, food poisoning is somewhat rare, with fewer than 1 in 10,000 people affected, although unrecognized cases would drive that estimate up. But if we do consider that rate and the average severity of symptoms to be bad enough that "something must be done," we should remember who the real culprits are. Contrary to vegetarian propaganda, plant foods -- especially those "fresh" kinds we're supposed to eat more of -- are the worst offenders.
May 27, 2010
Government welcomes Apple to big boys club with kick in the balls
Now that Steve Jobs' company is worth more than Bill Gates', the antitrust army has grown bored of lobbing bricks through Microsoft's windows and decided to poison Apple instead. (Here and here.)
Modern antitrust suits as a general rule are bogus; the companies under attack are typically responsible for falling prices and improving quality, all the way back to the first railroads and Standard Oil. They serve instead as a ritual to show whoever the fittest companies are that they'd better watch their behavior or else. In a market economy, this is unnecessary because firms that harm consumers will be driven out of business by competitors, and to the extent that these lawsuits tie up the companies' time, money, and manpower, they parasitize economic health.
But in a society ruled by competitive politics, government agents can only get away with what the public will allow, and will pursue what the median voter desires. If they don't, they'll get thrown out of office, or the elected official who appointed them or their party will be punished. The average person has so little faith in the ability of market competition to discipline how companies behave that they're willing to tolerate -- and often cheer on -- the antitrust "watchdogs" who only screw up the products that consumers love.
The price of going to the movies didn't get any cheaper when the government banned Hollywood studios from owning theaters in which to show their movies, and this is the source of the high price of popcorn and other concessions at the movies that consumers always complain about. Pretty soon it'll be harder or more expensive to get mp3s from iTunes, but people have such a deeply rooted fear of any big organization that they're willing to pay that higher price if it means someone gets to knock Apple around so that they don't get too big for their breeches.
Modern antitrust suits as a general rule are bogus; the companies under attack are typically responsible for falling prices and improving quality, all the way back to the first railroads and Standard Oil. They serve instead as a ritual to show whoever the fittest companies are that they'd better watch their behavior or else. In a market economy, this is unnecessary because firms that harm consumers will be driven out of business by competitors, and to the extent that these lawsuits tie up the companies' time, money, and manpower, they parasitize economic health.
But in a society ruled by competitive politics, government agents can only get away with what the public will allow, and will pursue what the median voter desires. If they don't, they'll get thrown out of office, or the elected official who appointed them or their party will be punished. The average person has so little faith in the ability of market competition to discipline how companies behave that they're willing to tolerate -- and often cheer on -- the antitrust "watchdogs" who only screw up the products that consumers love.
The price of going to the movies didn't get any cheaper when the government banned Hollywood studios from owning theaters in which to show their movies, and this is the source of the high price of popcorn and other concessions at the movies that consumers always complain about. Pretty soon it'll be harder or more expensive to get mp3s from iTunes, but people have such a deeply rooted fear of any big organization that they're willing to pay that higher price if it means someone gets to knock Apple around so that they don't get too big for their breeches.
May 25, 2010
Your first celebrity crush?
Looking through all 24 pages from this forum topic on who your first celebrity crush was, I'm struck by how few "high school sweetheart" types there have been in popular culture since the society became safer and duller after 1991. The earliest quasi-crush on an actress I had was for Stephanie from Full House, but she and I were too pre-teenish for it to last. My first head-over-heels crush was for, you guessed it --
God damn... now that's gonna leave a mark. What about yours?
Even though when they first became famous I didn't see many of the other girls from the '60s through the '80s listed in that forum topic, I can still appreciate them since they're all cut from the same mold. I hardly noticed her when I saw The Karate Kid as a small child, but if I had been older I totally would've fallen for the all-American Elisabeth Shue, barely 20 years old, springing around in those gym shorts and powerless to hold back her smiles. But then in the early-mid '90s the "it" girls start to get more frigid and annoying, masculinized in the face, and tending toward the butt-kicking babe of geek fantasy (now the mainstream guy has geek tastes). There are a couple exceptions, like that Alex Mack chick who my younger brother had a huge crush on, and later Jennifer Love Hewitt. But overall the fragile, energetic sweetheart who was born to make babies has faded from the cultural landscape.
It seems that in dangerous times, we're in hurry-it-up mode and want females who look like they want to have children at all, sooner rather than later, and more of them, and who appear faithful and nurturing. It's only during safe times, when our time horizon moves much farther away, that guys come to like bitchier and colder women whose careerism and mercenary attitude toward sex mean that you'll be lucky to squeeze any children out of her at all, and even then much later and not so many in number. If she's not that maternal and caring, meh so what, the world's safe enough that she won't need to protect them from that much anyway. In a safe world, kids basically raise themselves, so mommy has more free time to go beat up aliens.
It makes you feel bad for guys who were born after 1984 or so, since they got their first huge crushes (at age 9, let's say) around 1993 or after, when the girls available for them to imprint on were pretty bland, like Topanga from Boy Meets World, Pamela Anderson, and that chick from Resident Evil. We could test this by surveying guys of all ages and seeing how much variability in responses there is based on when you were born. If you came of age when there was an abundance of girls who naturally fascinate guys, your cohort will have lots of girls listed and each one will command a decent share of the cohort's affection. There might be 10 "it" girls each with roughly 10% of the share of affection. However, if you came of age when there were slim pickings, your cohort would latch onto the few pure specimens of femininity. There might only be 2 "it" girls, each with roughly 50% of the share of affection.
That looks like the real world, with the explosion of make-you-lose-sleep girls in the '70s and '80s, all of them about as popular as the others, compared to the tiny handful of category-dominating girls in the '90s and 2000s. The '60s didn't have too many either, but I attribute that to the under-developed state of mass pop culture at the time. If the markets for TV, movies, and pop music had been as mature as they became during the 1980s, I think the '60s would have had a lot more girls like Andy from The Goonies. Still, it wouldn't have been as great as during the '70s or '80s because the crime wave was only getting underway during the '60s and people had not totally converted to the "life is short, let's have fun" mindset.
God damn... now that's gonna leave a mark. What about yours?
Even though when they first became famous I didn't see many of the other girls from the '60s through the '80s listed in that forum topic, I can still appreciate them since they're all cut from the same mold. I hardly noticed her when I saw The Karate Kid as a small child, but if I had been older I totally would've fallen for the all-American Elisabeth Shue, barely 20 years old, springing around in those gym shorts and powerless to hold back her smiles. But then in the early-mid '90s the "it" girls start to get more frigid and annoying, masculinized in the face, and tending toward the butt-kicking babe of geek fantasy (now the mainstream guy has geek tastes). There are a couple exceptions, like that Alex Mack chick who my younger brother had a huge crush on, and later Jennifer Love Hewitt. But overall the fragile, energetic sweetheart who was born to make babies has faded from the cultural landscape.
It seems that in dangerous times, we're in hurry-it-up mode and want females who look like they want to have children at all, sooner rather than later, and more of them, and who appear faithful and nurturing. It's only during safe times, when our time horizon moves much farther away, that guys come to like bitchier and colder women whose careerism and mercenary attitude toward sex mean that you'll be lucky to squeeze any children out of her at all, and even then much later and not so many in number. If she's not that maternal and caring, meh so what, the world's safe enough that she won't need to protect them from that much anyway. In a safe world, kids basically raise themselves, so mommy has more free time to go beat up aliens.
It makes you feel bad for guys who were born after 1984 or so, since they got their first huge crushes (at age 9, let's say) around 1993 or after, when the girls available for them to imprint on were pretty bland, like Topanga from Boy Meets World, Pamela Anderson, and that chick from Resident Evil. We could test this by surveying guys of all ages and seeing how much variability in responses there is based on when you were born. If you came of age when there was an abundance of girls who naturally fascinate guys, your cohort will have lots of girls listed and each one will command a decent share of the cohort's affection. There might be 10 "it" girls each with roughly 10% of the share of affection. However, if you came of age when there were slim pickings, your cohort would latch onto the few pure specimens of femininity. There might only be 2 "it" girls, each with roughly 50% of the share of affection.
That looks like the real world, with the explosion of make-you-lose-sleep girls in the '70s and '80s, all of them about as popular as the others, compared to the tiny handful of category-dominating girls in the '90s and 2000s. The '60s didn't have too many either, but I attribute that to the under-developed state of mass pop culture at the time. If the markets for TV, movies, and pop music had been as mature as they became during the 1980s, I think the '60s would have had a lot more girls like Andy from The Goonies. Still, it wouldn't have been as great as during the '70s or '80s because the crime wave was only getting underway during the '60s and people had not totally converted to the "life is short, let's have fun" mindset.
May 24, 2010
Making sense of the hook-up culture
Most of the earnest, worried stories I read about "the hook-up culture" I immediately tune out. After all, these are stories about how supposedly common it is for teenagers or college students to hook up -- to engage in some unspecified level of sexual activity -- at a time when kissing, pawing, jerking, fingering, and fucking have all but gone the way of the drive-in movie theater, especially moving from one partner to another.
However, there's an article in the current New Yorker that I skimmed through and didn't see any such bogus claim about how prevalent promiscuity has become, but rather how strong or weak the emotional and romantic bonds are between those teenagers who are sexually active. (The author is not aware, though, that these are a shrinking minority of teenagers in general.) Her concern is over the impression that those who hook up aren't bound to each other psychologically, that they don't see anything magical or liminal in embarking on a sexual voyage, and that instead their mindset is more like, we might as well just get this outta the way, i mean it's not like it's a big deal or anythinggg.
I can see that -- the culture as a whole is a lot less romantic than it was during wild and dangerous times (roughly the late '50s through the very early '90s), when looming threats turn people's minds toward reproducing before something out there does them in. During safer times (from 1992 and counting) people feel secure enough to delay the various rites of passage that lead to baby-making. This fall in promiscuity and early sex is what shows up in the statistics I linked to above. BTW, the 2009 data will come out on June 3, and I'll formally predict that the promiscuity measures will show no significant increase from the 2007 data.
These data would make the worry-warts ecstatic, if they would bother to look them up -- "Oh thank god my little girl isn't messing around! And hey, whatever it takes to achieve these plummeting levels of promiscuity, let's do it." What they don't realize is that when people are less hormone-crazed, that has effects not only on how carefree -- or reckless -- they will behave, but also on how able they are to fall irrationally in love, to feel as though each act were a vehicle for leaving behind the world of the ordinary, and to want to suck all the juice out of each encounter rather than do it just to get it over with. (These differences show up even in porn made during safe vs. dangerous times.)
Anxiety-stricken parents and social workers could realize this by reflecting on when in life's stages is a person the most capable of forming an uncontrollable emotional bond to a sex partner -- you are most likely to fall head over heels in love when you are also the horniest, namely as an adolescent or young adult. The adorable type of love that older couples have is nowhere as intense, and they're probably glad that it isn't. They lost enough sleep and sweated enough buckets through their palms when they themselves where young. There's nothing cute and innocent about young love, though -- just remember how out-of-your-mind you were and how desperately you would have acted if that's what it took to win over that cute girl who sat across the aisle from you in science class.
I think this is also behind the perception that popular culture, at least music, has become skankier. The content is no less risque than it was during the '60s through the '80s, and female performers were wearing suggestive clothing since at least the '70s. Perhaps what people are sensing is the performer's lack of soul and mercenary attitude toward sex and her own body. And ditto male performers lacking soul and looking at women as strippers. Both trends come together in that terribly boring and undanceable song "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas. Back when people actually were promiscuous, pop songs such as "Like a Virgin" and "Little Red Corvette" showed girls who are eager to give in to their desires, rather than frigid women from whom sex can only be wrested through a financial transaction. Sex in those songs was something uniquely capable of sending the couple into a state of ecstasy -- not like someone's lunchtime routine of inserting a dollar bill into a vending machine, pecking at a keypad, and picking up the candy bar that gets dropped.
If the wild or tame strategy paid off more than the other no matter what, then one strategy would gradually replace the other. Instead, we see cycles from mostly wild to mostly tame and so on again. That must mean they pay roughly equal rewards on net, the wild strategy having dazzling benefits but greater costs, and the tame strategy having more meager benefits but smaller costs. But no one wants to accept that there are trade-offs for important matters in life, that the universe appears to conspire to keep them from having too much of a good thing. When times are dangerous and people wild, worry-warts crusade to curb promiscuity, which predictably results in shallower emotional attachments between lovers as people become less hormone-crazed. Then the crusade moves to curbing psychologically distant hook-ups, which will predictably be accompanied by a rise in how horny people are, thus driving promiscuity back up again.
As long as the audience members don't call them on it, professional and lay moral crusaders have a guaranteed full employment plan. Only by telling them to grow up and accept that life has many trade-offs will we clear our minds of the noise of their incessant hand-wringing.
However, there's an article in the current New Yorker that I skimmed through and didn't see any such bogus claim about how prevalent promiscuity has become, but rather how strong or weak the emotional and romantic bonds are between those teenagers who are sexually active. (The author is not aware, though, that these are a shrinking minority of teenagers in general.) Her concern is over the impression that those who hook up aren't bound to each other psychologically, that they don't see anything magical or liminal in embarking on a sexual voyage, and that instead their mindset is more like, we might as well just get this outta the way, i mean it's not like it's a big deal or anythinggg.
I can see that -- the culture as a whole is a lot less romantic than it was during wild and dangerous times (roughly the late '50s through the very early '90s), when looming threats turn people's minds toward reproducing before something out there does them in. During safer times (from 1992 and counting) people feel secure enough to delay the various rites of passage that lead to baby-making. This fall in promiscuity and early sex is what shows up in the statistics I linked to above. BTW, the 2009 data will come out on June 3, and I'll formally predict that the promiscuity measures will show no significant increase from the 2007 data.
These data would make the worry-warts ecstatic, if they would bother to look them up -- "Oh thank god my little girl isn't messing around! And hey, whatever it takes to achieve these plummeting levels of promiscuity, let's do it." What they don't realize is that when people are less hormone-crazed, that has effects not only on how carefree -- or reckless -- they will behave, but also on how able they are to fall irrationally in love, to feel as though each act were a vehicle for leaving behind the world of the ordinary, and to want to suck all the juice out of each encounter rather than do it just to get it over with. (These differences show up even in porn made during safe vs. dangerous times.)
Anxiety-stricken parents and social workers could realize this by reflecting on when in life's stages is a person the most capable of forming an uncontrollable emotional bond to a sex partner -- you are most likely to fall head over heels in love when you are also the horniest, namely as an adolescent or young adult. The adorable type of love that older couples have is nowhere as intense, and they're probably glad that it isn't. They lost enough sleep and sweated enough buckets through their palms when they themselves where young. There's nothing cute and innocent about young love, though -- just remember how out-of-your-mind you were and how desperately you would have acted if that's what it took to win over that cute girl who sat across the aisle from you in science class.
I think this is also behind the perception that popular culture, at least music, has become skankier. The content is no less risque than it was during the '60s through the '80s, and female performers were wearing suggestive clothing since at least the '70s. Perhaps what people are sensing is the performer's lack of soul and mercenary attitude toward sex and her own body. And ditto male performers lacking soul and looking at women as strippers. Both trends come together in that terribly boring and undanceable song "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas. Back when people actually were promiscuous, pop songs such as "Like a Virgin" and "Little Red Corvette" showed girls who are eager to give in to their desires, rather than frigid women from whom sex can only be wrested through a financial transaction. Sex in those songs was something uniquely capable of sending the couple into a state of ecstasy -- not like someone's lunchtime routine of inserting a dollar bill into a vending machine, pecking at a keypad, and picking up the candy bar that gets dropped.
If the wild or tame strategy paid off more than the other no matter what, then one strategy would gradually replace the other. Instead, we see cycles from mostly wild to mostly tame and so on again. That must mean they pay roughly equal rewards on net, the wild strategy having dazzling benefits but greater costs, and the tame strategy having more meager benefits but smaller costs. But no one wants to accept that there are trade-offs for important matters in life, that the universe appears to conspire to keep them from having too much of a good thing. When times are dangerous and people wild, worry-warts crusade to curb promiscuity, which predictably results in shallower emotional attachments between lovers as people become less hormone-crazed. Then the crusade moves to curbing psychologically distant hook-ups, which will predictably be accompanied by a rise in how horny people are, thus driving promiscuity back up again.
As long as the audience members don't call them on it, professional and lay moral crusaders have a guaranteed full employment plan. Only by telling them to grow up and accept that life has many trade-offs will we clear our minds of the noise of their incessant hand-wringing.
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