He wears cor blimey trousers

UKIP's Nigel Farage is apparently upset because Ken Clarke called his party 'clowns.' If it bothers him that much, maybe Nige should think twice before campaigning in the sort of unfortunate trousers* that bring to mind the punch line from this detergent ad:

Having a leader who wears bright yellow clown trousers shouldn't, in itself, make a party unelectable, but when the slapstick extends from the leader's dress sense to the business of policy making ... well, your links are here and here - make up your own minds...

*photograph taken in April when 'Self proclaimed expert on Peterborough’s social ills Nigel Farage graced the city with his presence', as an unimpressed Peterborough Today columnist reported.

Trolls - a spotter's guide

Are people using the word "troll" (noun or verb) with sloppy imprecision, or is the word just changing its meaning with use? This is what on line trolling / being an Internet troll originally seems to have meant:

A troll is deliberately crafted to provoke others with the intention of wasting their time and energy ... Trolls can be identified by their disengagement from a conversation or argument. They do not believe what they say, but merely say it for effect. 

In other words, geek-speak for an old-fashioned wind-up.

Amanda Marcotte argues that people are now reaching for the T-word to describe any loudmouth who happens to share an obnoxious opinion on line, even when said loudmouth sincerely holds that opinion. Which is, of course, not the same as saying something outrageous that you don't really believe, simply for effect:

One of the most common practices on the Internet, ranking somewhere between sharing cat videos and griping about minutiae on Facebook, is to dismiss people who share repellent, shocking, or just plain controversial opinions as "trolls." People have somehow convinced themselves that sincere opinions and attention-seeking behavior are mutually exclusive. (See a discussion of this from Slate's Farhad Manjoo, who is reasonably sick of the term being applied to people who aren't even trying to be offensive, even if their opinions are controversial.) 

You could say that calling some knuckle-dragging misogynist, racist, homophobe, or other bigot a "troll" is to pay that person an unwarranted compliment. A troll, after all, needs to have the intelligence to think about another person's values, self image, or world-view, then come up with a statement calculated to cause that person annoyance or distress. Most trolls are probably dysfunctional attention-seekers,* but the successful ones aren't completely stupid. Unlike bigots who mouth repellent trash because they're dumb enough to actually believe it.

On the whole, I agree with Marcotte, that we shouldn't say "troll" when we mean "bigot" (I plead guilty to such sloppy usage myself). I'm not quite so sure when it comes to "trolling" clickbait though. Up to a point, much of the content of, say, the Mail Online is simple, mouth-breathing bigotry, people with a prejudiced world-view spEaking their bRanes, either for the benefit of people with a similar world-view, or to propagandise to anybody who might be sitting on the fence between either using their prefrontal cortex to navigate complicated and important issues, or simply relying on the reptilian brainstem (AKA "common sense" in Mail-speak). In this sense, it's mere bigotry.

But there's also calculation there, the realisation that you can get a two-for-one click through rate by appealing directly to the worst instincts of bigots and outraging Guardianistas who click through to prove to themselves what unbelievable new depths the Mail has sunk to, then go and tell all their friends. Some of this is an accidental by-product of producing bullshit in industrial quantities, but I don't think the Mail's generating the amount of traffic it does by accident. There's ignorance and prejudice here, in spades, but there's also enough business sense to turn the art of the wind-up into a profitable revenue stream. I don't like to pay the usual suspects at the Mail Online the compliment of calling them "trolls", but the fact that they've successfully commidified outrage suggests that they are - within their own limited domain - more than just stupid bigots. Never underestimate the enemy.


*with a few exceptions where the trolling is precisely targeted to demolish a particularly silly point of view, to tweak people who are taking themselves way too seriously, or to puncture pomposity

Learned helplessness is the way forward, insists Tony Blair

In the 1990s and the 2000s, right-wing parties were the enthusiasts of the market, pushing for the deregulation of banks, the privatisation of core state functions and the whittling away of social protections. All of these now look to have been very bad ideas. The economic crisis should really have discredited the right, not the left. So why is it the left that is paralysed? 

Asks Henry Farrell, suggesting a plausible explanation for why the dysfunctional status quo shows no sign of changing. Maybe he's right and there are inescapable structural reasons why nobody's yet been able to reverse some of those 'very bad ideas':

The problem that the centre-left now faces is not that it wants to make difficult or unpopular choices. It is that no real choices remain. It is lost in the maze, able neither to reach out to its traditional bases of support (which are largely dying or alienated from it anyway) nor to propose any grand new initiatives, the state no longer having the tools to implement them. When the important decisions are all made outside of democratic politics, the centre-left can only keep going through the ritualistic motions of democracy, all the while praying for intercession. 

I hope it ain't so, but at least not having the tools is an adequate excuse for not finishing the job. The Labour party's resident back seat driver, Tony Blair, sees the same paradox, but his own excuse for doing little more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic is about as convincing as 'the dog ate my homework':

The paradox of the financial crisis is that, despite being widely held to have been caused by under-regulated markets, it has not brought a decisive shift to the left. But what might happen is that the left believes such a shift has occurred and behaves accordingly.

The cataclysmic failure of a global economic and political consensus based on a distinct, explicit set of right-wing policies 'has not brought a decisive shift to the left', therefore Ed Miliband shouldn't even think about making any radical changes. We know it's broke, but we can't possibly fix it because Mondeo Man says no. The other lot can push the Overton Window as far to the right as they like, but woe betide Ed if he tries to push it back by a single inch.

It's one thing to recognise real obstacles to change, quite another to advocate learned helplessness as a political strategy. If this is the best Blair can come up with, he should stick to jetting around the world, offering his exclusive ego-massage service to the global elite, or enjoying drinks and nibbles with Toby Young and James Delingpole at the next meeting of the Michael Gove fan club.

Only in America

Like everybody else who's made this obvious point, I'm either preaching to the converted or talking to the hand, but what the hell:

•  A home-made bomb set off by two hapless, disorganised, irrational misfits kills 3 people, including a child.
• One hapless, disorganised, irrational misfit gets hold of his mum's legally owned semi-automatic rifle and  kills 27 other people, including 20 children.

Do the math.

Blade inflation

With most people's disposable incomes dwindling to the size of a banker's conscience, why does anybody still shave with those overpriced proprietary handle and cartridge razor systems? Refill cartridges for the heavily-marketed multi-bladed razors (like the Mach 3 or Fusion brands Gillette markets to guys, or the Venus Proskin, aimed at the laydeez) are currently selling at somewhere between £1.80 and a tad over £3.30 per unit.* You can easily get a bog-standard Bic or supermarket own-brand disposable razor at a unit price of around 10p.

The manufacturers claim that their fancy, multi-blade cartridges shave you better. I'm sceptical, but even if we allow that there might be some measurable difference in the quality of shave you get with an expensive cartridge, as opposed to some cheap disposable, it sure as hell won't shave you over eighteen times better. Ensuring that your skin and bristles are thoroughly softened by warm water will have far more of an effect on the quality of your shave than using an elaborate multi-blade cartridge system (they call it "wet shaving" for a reason).

Disposables are better value, which ever way you slice it, but it's a bit wasteful, throwing a whole disposable away after a few uses. Even better than disposables are your old-fashioned standard double-edged safety razor blades. It's becoming obvious that the manufacturers, supermarkets and chemists don't like stocking these (too little mark-up, presumably) and it's becoming common to find even large shops failing to stock them. On the supermarket web site I checked, they sold only one variety of double edged-blades (out of 115 products related to the search term 'razor blades'), their own brand, at a unit price that was a few pence higher than the price of an average disposable.

Look on the Internet, though, and generic, double-edged safety razor blades can be had at a unit price that easily matches or beats the cost of a bog-standard supermarket disposable razor. A lot of them seem to be manufactured in places like India and Russia where there must still be plenty of people outside the rising middle class or oligarchy who haven't got the disposable income to waste on overpriced multi-blade razor cartridges.

The business model for shaving cartridges is a bit like the one for ink jet printer cartridges. There's no money in selling a printer / razor handle. The real profits are to be made after you've persuaded the punter to buy your particular brand of printer / shaving system, which works with only with consumables that aren't compatible with any other brand. Once you've locked your customer in, you can charge whatever you think you can get away with for the consumables.

In the case of printers, there have always been competing and incompatible systems, so the manufacturers have had a head start when it comes to tying their customers in. When alternatives have come along, they're able to stay one step ahead of buyers by designing their printers to work badly, or not at all, when a consumer attempts to refill a cartridge or use a third-party cartridge.

Razor manufacturers have had to try harder when it comes to locking customers in. King C. Gillette's safety razor with disposable blades was protected by patent from 1903, when he started to manufacture, until 1921, but by the time the patent had expired, it was easy for other manufacturers to make generic, interchangeable razor blades very cheaply. The manufactures of ink jet cartridges have never had to deal with a similar threat of a common standard that completely destroyed their ability to lock consumers in to their expensive, proprietary consumables.

Wilkinson Sword took the first step away from the generic razor blade in 1970, when it introduced its "bonded shaving system", a single blade embedded in a disposable plastic cartridge, ostensibly to make changing blades easier and to reduce the risk of injury. This solved a problem which probably wasn't much of a problem in the first place - I've been wet shaving with single blades for quite a few years now and I've never come close to injuring myself when changing blades, although I'm as prone as the next person to being clumsy, especially when in a hurry in the early morning. I reckon that by the time I'm doddery enough to be at real risk of a blade-changing-related injury, I'll probably be too shaky to shave myself anyway.

The Gillette company "bettered" the single-blade cartridge by introducing a twin blade cartridge, marketed with the questionable claim that 'It's one blade better than whatever you're using now.' By 1998 Gillette, now confident that a generation of consumers had swallowed the hype about more blades equalling a better shave, introduced the "Mach 3" cartridge with - guess what - three blades. Schick/Wilkinson duly responded to the Mach 3 with its four-bladed Quattro cartridge.

By 2004, The Onion could see where all this marketing-led blade inflation was leading and, sure enough, in 2006, real life caught up with satire when Gillette introduced its five-bladed Fusion cartridge.

All this marketing-led "innovation" has been so profitable that even mighty professional bullshitters look on Gillette's works and despair. Associate professor of marketing and consultant to some of the world's biggest brands, Mark Ritson, was suitably awestruck:

First, drive profitability. Market share might have reached its zenith, but that doesn't mean your margins can't be squeezed. One industry insider recently claimed that, despite a pack of four Fusion razor blades retailing for £9.72, the manufacturing and packaging costs for the product are less than 30p. That's a whopping mark-up of more than 3000%. How about that for a margin?

Second, practise positive cannibalisation. Gillette launched its five-blade Fusion line in 2006 with a 30% price premium over Mach 3, its previous three-blade offering. With an 85% market share, it makes more sense for Gillette to focus its marketing on switching its own customers from Mach 3 to the more profitable Fusion line than trying to win any more competitor share. That is why Gillette is spending millions to compete against itself with ads and online comparisons to convince its Mach 3 consumers that their current razor is simply not good enough and to trade up to Fusion.

Third, drive usage. This has always been the number-one way to fuel profitability. In Gillette's case the company is now investing heavily in an online campaign to encourage consumers to use their Gillette razor downstairs as well as upstairs. Videos with powerful messages, such as 'When there's no underbrush, the tree looks taller', are increasing blade-use on the lower body. One of the joys of an 85% share is that you can run general campaigns to grow total category usage, safe in the knowledge that most of the upturn in sales will benefit your brands.

That's right, guys - shaving your pubes in the hope that your penis will look bigger is what all the cool kids are doing (a marketing professional told me, so it must be true). Even The Onion didn't see that one coming.

The wacky "innovations" of the modern Proctor and Gamble-owned Gillette company are a world away from the real innovation of King C. Gillette,** whose invention was undeniably better than the old cut throat razors (there's a subtle clue as to why they sucked, right there in the name) and rival safety blades that you had to spend ages sharpening, with mixed results.The safety razor he pioneered works well, it's cheap to use and generates a tiny amount of recyclable waste. Its replacement by cartridges has allowed corporations to profiteer hugely whilst providing no - or at best, marginal - benefits to the end user.

Today's top tip for life in an austerity-ridden world - ditch the overpriced shaving cartridges, get yourself a perfectly adequate double-edged razor in the fifteen to twenty five quid bracket (more expensive models are available, but if you spend much more, you're just showing off) and a few blades for pennies each.***

What marketing professionals say in public is that modern consumers are way too savvy and sophisticated to be taken in by the first stupid bit of marketing they see, polished up with he odd celebrity endorsement. Looking at the way shaving products are marketed, I suspect that what they think in private is 'there's a sucker born every minute.'



*as advertised on the web site of a major supermarket.

**There's a huge a divergence of values, too, at least according to Wikipedia, where Gillette is described as a 'Utopian socialist', a refreshing contrast with the predatory profiteers currently trading under his name. Mind you, some aspects of his Utopian socialism sounded pretty wacky, too - he apparently believed that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis, powered by Niagara Falls. OK, the concept is pretty out there, but when a guy's made one really brilliant idea work, why begrudge him his bit of blue-skies thinking?

***Or buy the slightly more expensive premium Merkur brand blades, if you really must.

The Irony Lady

I'm sick to the back teeth of the Thatcher retrospective, but there's one strange aspect to all of this that I haven't seen mentioned in the wall-to-wall commentary. You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss:

And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

These words and their context have been endlessly argued about and analysed but, although the nuances may be blurry, the broad sentiment is as clear as gin. She's praising individuality, upholding the right of individuals and families to think and act for themselves, rather than being enslaved to groupthink and the pressure to conform.

Which is more or less the precise opposite of how the mainstream media/political complex has spun her passing. 'We are all Thatcherites now', 'Britain bids farewell to "Iron Lady"', 'We must show our respect on the day of Margaret Thatcher's funeral', 'her policies may have divided us, but her memory unites us'. All of a sudden, there is such a thing as society, there's a collective identity called 'Britain', united by the inescapable presence of The Blessed Margaret and the things she has bequeathed to The Collective.

There's a particularly stupid form of words that sums up the officially-approved way of thinking about Thatcher. It goes something like this -  'You can say what you like about Margaret Thatcher, but, love her or hate her, you have to admit that [insert platitude here].'

Hang on a minute. I have to admit something? Really? So I don't get to think for myself? And if I don't admit it, what are you going to do about it? Does it involve electrodes, or maybe a spot of waterboarding? No? Just a gentle application of moral blackmail, combined with a spot of groupthink? Is that all you've got? No mate, I'm not admitting anything. I 'm an individual and I'm quite capable of thinking for myself, thank you very much.

Not only is there now such a thing as society, but that society is portrayed as possessing a collective hive mind that must think appropriate thoughts on a shared occasion. There are certain truths to which every member of the hive 'has to' assent - to do otherwise would be as unthinkable as a worker bee questioning the queen's place in the hive hierarchy.

There are individuals who loved Thatcher(ism), others who hated her/it and others who couldn't have cared less. How ironic that the epitaph of the high priestess of individualism is starting to sound like a party political broadcast on behalf of the Borg:

And, you know, there are no such things as individual men and women. There is only Britain, our shared hive, and The Collective, my brood. Like it or not, you are all my children now.

skyPod

Well, I think we've done the subject of Our Greatest Ever Prime Minister With A Handbag to death (so to speak), bored with that now. But here's something I didn't know about Our Greatest Ever Prime Minister With A Cigar. Who knew that Winston wasn't considered safe at altitudes of over 8,000 feet, or that they manufactured a custom-made prime-ministerial survival pod* in order to avoid the PM popping like a badly-stored champagne bottle** whilst being shuttled to important conferences in the unpressurised planes of the day?


*in the event, the skyPod seems not to have been needed, although I'm not sure whether they resolved the problem by risking Winnie's health at high altitude, staying under 8,000 feet, or finding a pressurised or partly-pressurised plane (a rarity in those days).

**I was once told, by someone in the wine trade, that Winston's taste in bubbly extended to include Freixenet cava. Although Freixenet's not bad stuff and quite good enough for the wedding of somebody like me, unused to a champagne lifestyle, I rather doubt whether someone with Churchill's aristocratic pedigree would have bothered with a good imitation of champagne, when the family budget would have easily stretched to the best vintages of real thing. We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now, as the saying goes.

via Dieselpunk and io9 

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Corrected - I originally suggested that the skyPod wasn't used, as Churchill's Avro York transport had a pressurised cabin fitted anyway. In fact it seems that the York's intended 'pressure chamber' was the skyPod, which was never fitted or used.