Archive for December, 2008
Monday, December 15th, 2008
The Doctor is In…
James Keye is the nom de plume of a biologist and psychologist who after discovering a mismatch between academe and himself went into private business for many years. His whole post-pubescent life has been focused on understanding at both the intellectual and personal levels what it is to be of the human species; he claims some success.
It’s true. His latest piece is typical — solid, powerful perspective, freshly framed. Very highly recommended…
Thursday, December 11th, 2008
Obamacare: Cowardly War Criminal to Impose It
Look at those $1500 designer eyeglasses on the downcast Tom Daschle. (Larger view here.) [Gosh, Tom, if you're really being brought in to solve a long-running social crisis that is "critical," why aren't you beaming? Could it be you're conflicted by what you know your real task will be?]
These glasses tend to confirm my theory that you can take a good rough measure of the sanity of a modern society by observing the sanity and aesthetic value of eyeglass styles (which, like cars and houses and everything else, get progressively worse over a certain price) among its movers and shakers.
But I digress from the real news, which is that Obama sucks, big-time.
Tom Daschle is an unindicted war criminal and mass murderer: He voted yes on the bill to authorize the massively, blantantly illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.
Decked out in his fancy glasses and fresh from his gig as a pimp at the K Street corporate-capitalist mafia operation Alston & Bird, this creepy, insidious little thug is going to help Obama make it illegal to NOT purchase private “health insurance” in the United States, and call that appalling act of mass murder by omission “reform.”
Here’s Mr. Daschle’s shameful statement of his conventional lily-livered, sociopathic Tweedle-D position on this utterly simple and basic issue, cut from his ghostwritten new “book” purportedly “explaining” his extreme cravenness and cowardice:
The key question for any health-care reform plan is, “How will it cover people?” Most of the world’s highest-ranking health-care systems employ some kind of “single-payer” strategy – that is, the government, directly or through insurers, is responsible for paying doctors, hospitals, and other health-care providers. Supporters say single-payer is brilliantly simple, ensures equity by providing all people with the same benefits, and saves billions of dollars by creating economies of scale and streamlining administration. But pure single-payer system is politically problematic in the United States, at least right now. Even though polls show that seniors are happier with Medicare than younger people are with their private insurance, opponents of reform have demonized government-run systems as “socialized medicine.”
I have strong views on what an “ideal” system would look like. But I’m not willing to sacrifice worthy improvements on the altar of perfection. I find it encouraging that the leading Democratic presidential contenders appear to share this attitude. The proposals that Obama, Clinton, and Edwards put forward would improve our current system rather than scrapping it, using the Massachusetts reform plan as a model.
You see how this unchanged and unchanging shuffle works? Massively obvious and wildly popular basic simplicity and decency is politically problematic “right now,” despite the fact that the “right now” in question is a month after a landslide victory for the party and President of “change,” and smack in the middle of an economic meltdown screaming for something, anything to be done to help the commoners get out of the financial and existential gutter to which they’ve been abandoned.
And the Daschle logic is powerful, too, isn’t it? Why not take a risk and act like a political leader, rather than a purchased and pathetic fraud? Why not put your allegedly strong views into action as the new “health czar?”
Because “I’m not willing to.”
(And, luckily, neither is the new President nor his cabinetful of fellow war criminals.)
And exactly what “worthy improvements” are we speaking of here? Unnamed, as always, because none are forthcoming, as amply demonstrated by the Massachusetts scam that has become the consensus “bipartisan” next step in the ultra-decrepit US overclass’s continuing efforts to rule out any and all exceptions to market totalitarianism, no matter the cost.
Tom Daschle belongs in jail. With apologies to the sacred human form, he is a dick, a pussy, an asshole, the worst sort of paid killer. Fuck! I almost can’t stand this walking, talking shit! Scotty, beam me up…
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
The Higher-Ed Catch-22
Chris Hedges sometimes misses, but he often also rings the bell.
He has nailed it on the topic of what you get at the nation’s elite colleges, along with your entitlement to be first hired, last fired:
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service — economic, political and social — come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
Alas, I can attest that the nation’s second-tier colleges — now tellingly rebranded, one and all, as “universities” — are peopled with managers and gatekeepers steeped in the elite disease. As a result, they devote their core efforts to replicating rather than transcending the sickness. Despite the times, this socially suicidal squandering of the most precious resources shows no sign of changing.
Monday, December 8th, 2008
The Trickle-Down Bailout
As Dr. King wrote from Birmingham City Jail, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
That’s as strong a sociological law as there is.
Despite protestations to the contrary by the powerful and their political and media lapdogs, it applies in spades to the phenomenon currently being called “the bailout.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Sunday, December 7th, 2008
Coming Clean…
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
The Automation of Advertising
As I explained in The Consumer Trap book, modern Big Business Marketing is a logical and historical extension of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management. What Taylor grew famous for teaching early corporate barons to do to the paid-labor process, latter-day corporate planners do to the off-the-job experiences of their prospective customers.
So, it is only natural that all the same extensions that have swept modern capitalist labor-process design will eventually also occur within the competitively expanding BBM process.
Lo and behold, from today’s New York Times:
ONLINE advertisers are not lacking in choices: They can display their ads in any color, on any site, with any message, to any audience, with any image.
Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients’ online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.
It is technology that could cause a shift in the advertising world. The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad’s success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad’s brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.
The question is, “how do we combine creative energy, which is a manual and sort of qualitative exercise, with the raw processing power of computing, which is all about quantitative data?” said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of VivaKi Ventures, the investment unit of Publicis Groupe.
The push to automate the creative elements of ad units is coming from two companies in California, not Madison Avenue.
Adisn, based in Long Beach, and Tumri, based in Mountain View, are working both sides of the ad equation. On one, they are trying to figure out who is looking at a page by using a mix of behavioral targeting and analysis of the page’s content. On the other side, they are assembling an ad on the fly that is meant to appeal to that person.
Both companies assume there is no perfect version of an ad, and instead assemble hundreds of different versions that are displayed on Web sites where their clients have bought ad space, showing versions of an ad to actual consumers as they browse the Web.
That might lead to finding that an ad for a baby supply store is more popular with young mothers when it features a bottle instead of diapers.
(Adisn and Tumri both measure the ad’s effectiveness based on parameters the advertiser sets, like how many people clicked on the ad or how many people actually bought something after clicking on it. They compare those with standard ads they run as part of a control group.)
Adisn’s approach has been to build a database of related words so it can assess the content of a Web site or blog based on the words on its pages.
Based on that analysis, Adisn’s system pulls different components — actors, fonts, background images — to make an ad. For example, it might show an ad with a blue background, an image of a beach, and a text about tickets to Hawaii. “Once we’ve built this huge database of hundreds of millions of relationships” between words, said Andy Moeck, the chief executive of Adisn, the system can “make a very good real-time decision as to what is the most relevant or appropriate campaign we could show.”
