Friday, November 16, 2012

Why Coke cost a nickel for 70 years

The answer: the original founder didn't think bottled Coke would catch on, so when a bunch of lawyers made a proposal to buy syrup at a given price forever, he took it just to get them out of his office.

Bottled Coke took off, and Coke couldn't raise the price of syrup - but it could put the nickel price prominently in every ad it published.  It took the syrup buyers 70 years to capitulate.

The real war within the GOP

Nice insight: Limbaugh does better financially if the Republicans lose.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Politics and depression


God grant me the courage to change what I can,
the serenity to accept what I can't,and the wisdom to bury the bodies where they won't be found.
I started the Politics and Propaganda blog this election season in order to write some thinking down about that morass of politics, economics, propaganda, religion, and so on that I lump together in my head as "how society works".  This allowed me to ignore it and get on with paying work, and the programming that I expect to improve my life.

There is evil in the world.  It causes me considerable pain to see people I love and respect eaten by it, knowing that there isn't one single thing I can do about it. Hence the second part of the title of this note: depression.

I've struggled with depression since adolescence.  It's a useless way to live. It makes everything feel insurmountable, sometimes even taking the next breath. You can game yourself into a manic state and plow through things, but in the end you slump back down into the darkness.

The only way to avoid depression is to deflect it.  You focus on things you can do, things you know you're good at, and you just ... watch the depression go away.  It does, every time, but it's like relaxing your leg when you wake up with a charlie horse - it doesn't feel natural or even possible until after the fact.  And the cramp still hurts for the rest of the day.

Politics is something I can't do.  Encountering wrongness at the personal level is just too much for me.  Like a leg cramp, where the muscles knot up and fight themselves, my emotions and ideas snarl together into a morass.  The outrage is just too painful, and it drains away my life.  A single off-hand remark from someone I respect can kill a day or more, and I can't afford it.

It's my hope that the ideas I explore on this blog will someday allow me to comprehend politics at a scientific level - an automated level - safely removed from the personal conflict that I have such difficulty with.  Because there really is evil in the world, and I see it as my duty to counter it in whatever small way I can.

But in the meantime, when somebody is wrong on the Internet, I'm just going to let it go.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Donald Trump and a tax on China

Today I learned Donald Trump thinks the problem with the American economy is insufficient protectionism.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

God's eternal Word

In 1970, God's Eternal Word still said that abortion was OK.  In the late 80's, though, Jerry Falwell decided God's Eternal Word said that life begins at birth - and now, people believe that because "it's in the Bible".

Which, of course, it isn't.

Cretaceous shorelines and voting

Cool post!  The upshot: during the Cretaceous, an arc of what is now the Deep South was the shore of a warm, shallow sea, and plankton died there for millions of years, settled to the bottom, and became chalk.  The result: some of the most fertile soil in North America. So fertile that cotton yields were enormous, so plantation owners needed a lot of slaves to harvest it.  And their descendants are still there, and voted Obama this week.

I love this kind of analysis.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Karl Rove's demise du jour

Karl Rove really didn't want to believe the data guys at Fox (! Fox has data guys?!?) who called Ohio for Obama last night - and was soundly schooled.  This is interesting.  Rove is a pundit at Fox while simultaneously being a mover and shaker in the election itself, and he talks a fast game that has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with narrative.

Rove gets narrative.  He swims in a sea of narrative.  And since the Clinton era, Rove's narrative has driven this country, so it is truly amazing to me that the data guys, of all people, showed him up.  It makes me hope that maybe America's love affair with vacuous narrative, instead of the actual study and science that made us great, may be waning.

A guy can hope.

Anyway - the article at Alternet that sparked this musing.

Monday, November 5, 2012

The Long Con

A fantastic post by Rick Perlstein at the Baffler: The Long Con looks at the Republican snake-oil machine - in an incredibly literal sense.  They really have no shame.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

The Forer effect

The Forer effect: people assign high accuracy to descriptions of their personality that they perceive as tailored just for them - but that are actually general enough to describe anybody.

The fantasy world of the persecuted rich

Two for one!  New York Magazine on the fantasy world proper (with statistics!) and AlterNet, bemoaning the ability of the rich to forget the context in which they were able to become rich.

So how did the rich get this isolated from reality?  Self-propaganda?

Speaking of moochers

How did the GOP come up with that, anyway?  Michael Tomasky thinks he knows.

Social programs for the wealthy

Washington Monthly has an article on tax moochers I'd like to finish reading.

American culture war

...can be construed as a conflict between Yankee Puritan nobility and Barbadian Southern nobility.  That's pretty interesting!  Two books to read:

  • Albion's Seed - examines four British cultures in America; the first volume of a new history of America
  • American Nations - a more detailed analysis of eleven regional American cultures.
Both sound utterly fascinating; neither is available in ebook format.