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A Tale Of Two Women And How They Are Perceived

Jack Baruth by Jack Aug 23

One of the recurring themes of the stuff I write here and elsewhere is the relationship between signified and signifier. The true nature of something and the outward appearances, the appurtenances, the accessories. If I could simply obtain the gift of always seeing the former and never the latter, I would be wealthy, successful, loved beyond my limits of my imagination. It’s unlikely to happen. I’ll continue to sit in Plato’s Cave, facing the wall, just like the rest of us.

At least I have company, as this following anecdote will demonstrate.

Two women, each alike in dignity. Except they aren’t. Woman A, we’ll call her “Jane”, is successful, career-oriented. She’s attractive in a quiet Midwestern way and wears a lot of vintage clothing that verges on costume. She attends church regularly, believes in God.

Woman B, we’ll call her “Ashley”, is a professional stage performer. Drop-dead gorgeous. This close to being an alcoholic. She’s out every night showing off her body and her big eyes. Swears a lot. Isn’t afraid of much.

These are appearances. And they are mostly correct. Jane won’t sleep with anyone. She’s about the most moral woman I know. She takes relationships extremely seriously and is extremely agitated by them once she’s in them. Ashley will sleep with about anyone who catches her eye, on the first night, totally DTF, makes no bones about it. She will openly discuss sex in mixed company and speak at length about her preferences in male genitalia.

So far, so good. I’ve known them both for a few years. Just what you’d expect.

So here’s the odd thing. One of them is continually sought-after by wealthy, love-sick men who want to marry her, take her to the suburbs, and have kids with her. These men will promise and pledge anything. The other one is continually solicited by “friends” for random sex and treated about like you’d treat a fuck-buddy by every man within tapping distance.

No prizes for guessing that Ashley, the woman who’s ridden a hundred ponies, is the one who is continually receiving marriage proposals, and that Jane is the one who has men in her church congregation say dirty things to her after the service. This wouldn’t be worth a blog post if that weren’t the case. The woman who would be delighted to settle down with a devoted millionaire finds herself getting emails that resolve down to “stop by my house next time you’re in town and I’ll rawdog you on the couch, on which you can then sleep because I need my beauty rest alone in my queen bed.” The one who likes sport-fucking the way I like listening to Led Zeppelin III has her one-nighters come back from the bathroom with an engagement ring in hand.

As a result, neither one is happy. Jane keeps getting her heart broken and Ashley finds herself struggling to keep her multiple sex partners from discovering each other, as if she were a man or something.

I want to believe that there is a way for both of them to solve their perception problems, but I wonder about that. Jane is never going to adopt the “bitch shield” that would prevent her from receiving those odd advances from dudes. If she’d banged a dozen guys in her teens, she’d have it by now. Like the SCCA rulebook, the bitch shield is written in blood. Ashley is never going to have a man just walk away from her because each one of them is convinced it will be different for him. Each one of them sees her smiling at him at a party and thinks, “Although I just heard her discuss how she recently had a Ukrainian bartender ejaculate on her belly button, I know that what she secretly wants is to be my scrubby-clean wife from now until we die together on Golden Pond.” Both of these women pay the price because men can’t bring themselves to see a truth that is plain to anyone who looks.

All of this just confirms what I’ve come to realize is my life mission: to understand reality as well as I can. To free myself from all my illusions, from the cheering white lie (“Hey, I’m pretty good at playing jazz chords”) to the massive misunderstanding of how life works (“I know that I can change the way the PR machine works in the auto-journo business by just speaking up about it”). To live in reality, at all times. It’s not fun and it’s sobering and there’s nowhere to turn when you feel sad, but it is firm, you can stand on it. Once you get used to living in reality, you can change what’s broken. Until then, you’ll suffer, just like my friends, and just like every man who stands in front of them.

[jwkr]

So as I have made clear in some other posts, I have been working my way through Breaking Bad. I am transfixed. It is an amazing show.

As I have been watching I have been thinking about why it “works.” Several reasons come to mind: it’s well-written. It’s well-filmed. It seems “true” — that...

[jwkr]

Tom Perkins is scared shitless... of the fact that his wealth needs the context of society to be relevant

Perhaps I didn't read this correctly, but I find this Josh Marshall peice to be quite interesting (though perhaps a little awkwardly worded). What I get from it is that the 2008 crisis slapped the plutocracy with a reality about which the rest of America is only slowly becoming aware: namely that the position of the 1% is fragile, and that the maintenance of their feelings of self worth and of the wealth they control is inextricably bound to the society of which they are a part.

They now seem to understand that they are extracting huge economic rents that aren't exactly justified by any normal moral order, but they dont want to change their behavior. As a consequence they're becoming more and more defensive of public discussions of this point, because the more it's discussed and the harder the 99% thinks about it, the harder it will be for the plutocracy to maintain their outsized appropriation of gains to economic growth.

Am I getting this right?

[jwkr]

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

The Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules were partially struck down today by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said the Commission did not properly justify its anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules.

Those rules in the Open Internet Order, adopted in 2010, forbid ISPs from blocking services or charging content providers for access to the network. Verizon challenged the entire order and got a big victory in today’s ruling. While it could still be appealed to the Supreme Court, the order today would allow pay-for-prioritization deals that could let Verizon or other ISPs charge companies like Netflix for a faster path to consumers.

I’m conflicted about net neutrality. Not about the notion that the Internet should remain open to everyone, even if ensuring that requires (gasp) regulatory interference. But I’m not so sure that “pay-for-prioritization deals” are intrinsically evil.

Way back in the dark ages—the late 1990s—I managed capacity on a major data network. Even back then, our switches had the ability to prioritize traffic whose packets were tagged as being certain kinds of data. (We called it “QoS,” quality of service.) The technology we were expecting to replace frame relay—asynchronous transfer mode—had this functionality built-in as a protocol level. The rationale for this was that some kinds of traffic really need higher priority. You see, IP was designed with no guarantees of low latency or even of packets arriving in the right order. For a terminal connection, a web page (or a Gopher page!) or a file transfer—for any of the kinds of stuff the Internet was originally being used for in the early ’90s and before—this was okay. For anything that involves real-time streaming, though, the results can range from suboptimal to unusable. However, ATM never truly took off; during the original dotcom boom, telecom companies and the equipment manufacturers selling to them raced to build so much big-pipe infrastructure that it became easier and cheaper to solve network congestion and latency problems by just throwing more bandwidth at them.

At least, it did for a decade or so. But bandwidth consumed per user has grown far faster than the absolute number of users have. You are using ten times the bandwidth now than you were five or six years ago. The cost to get you that bandwidth has dropped substantially on a per-kilobyte basis, but your ISP is making less off of you in 2014 than they did in 2007. This isn’t a problem for the ISPs as long as new customers are being added like mad. Through the 2000s they were, but not anymore—yet demand per user is still climbing steadily. Where’s the new revenue to offset the new infrastructure costs come from? Content providers have historically never been charged a premium based on the amount and kind of content they’re providing—but we may be at the point where we can’t keep kicking the can down the road by making the pipes fatter.

The worry about creating a “class divide” between content providers who can pay for better service and those who can’t is valid, but the real battle being fought isn’t about free speech and open access. It’s about how to spread the cost of building the infrastructure we need for our increasingly everything-over-IP future. And no one involved is really neutral.

[jwkr]

Cosmic Justice 

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Why Tesla is the only winner in electric vehicles

Why Tesla is the first successful manufacturer of electric vehicles is a question that doesn't seem to be pondered as much as it should. Its an interesting question and one at the heart of this weeks AsymCar podcast.

In the broadcast Deidu argues that the Tesla acts primarily as a signaling device for the owner, to indicate that he or she cares about the environment, which is why we see a high end product being far more successful than a low end product. Essentially, the Tesla provides a noneconomic benefit to the consumer that raises his or her self esteem and therefore, is worth the additional cost.

I agree that the decision to purchase an electric car is not necessarily a rationally financial one. But people do not make rational financial decisions. Simon Kemp (1987) found that when recalling price movements people overweight frequent expenditures and underweight infrequent ones leading to a biased interpretation of prices paid. The mechanics of the car market aren't that different; people vastly overweight the contribution of fuel to the total cost of ownership of a car because they buy it all the time. Given this, ceteris paribus, a car with zero fuel cost is going to be purchased more often than a car with a substantial fuel cost. In addition, Americans have been socialized for three decades to believe that foreign oil is bad and that use of gasoline means larger oil imports.

But that is rather immaterial. The zero fuel cost or the non-oil use will only get people to purchase the product if it can serve the job it's hired to do. And the primary reason that Tesla is successful because they realize that the job cars are hired to do is one of extreme overservice. Case in point: when I purchased my last vehicle, I had narrowed my choice to a Honda S2000 and a BMW 330i. Ultimately I thought the Honda was more fun, but I chose the BMW because I wanted to able to take more people and cargo in it... something I do about 5 times a year. This kind of overservice is rampant in the car market and the most prominent form of it is distance travel.

One of the best discussions on this topic is by Coltaire Rapaille in his book "The Culture Code". The thesis is that consumers have ideas that they associate with adjectives that describe products and if a product doesn't conform to those expected of it then it won't sell. I would argue that the primary essence of cars is freedom. Freedom is central to car culture and for consumers the knowledge that they can travel 1200 miles anytime they want to or need to is essential for a car to be perceived as a car, even if the consumer never doesit.

And here we have the central problem with most low end electric cars. The biggest expense in an electric car is the battery. So low end electric cars include a small one that gives around 100 miles or so of range. This is perfectly adequate for most people's daily travel routine, but it is nowhere near enough to make people forget about range anxiety. Both the Teslas built so far have had ranges in excess of 200 miles and versions of the Model S can go up to 300! But the cost include a battery that big is significant, and it is less easy to use standard platforms because of the weight issues inherent with such a large battery. So Musk solved the problem by making the Tesla a luxury car, for which he could charge a price premium. And he priced the thing such that he could include a gigantic battery that would alleviate range anxiety for most customers.

And then they did something even better. They built a network of supercharges that can charge the car in 30 minutes. All of this was done to alleviate the primary concern that most people have with electric cars, which is that--before the Tesla--they were confining and not freeing.

The reason the Tesla is successful is because it overserves so dramatically in the one key area other electric cars do not. But it could not do that at a low end price point. Ergo, it's expensive, and has luxury features since it must to justify the price to consumers.

The GM EV1 on the other hand, really was a signaling car. It was slow to move, slow to charge and had horrible range. It was in only the most superficial way a replacement for internal combustion cars at the time. And it was for that reason that they were purchased predominantly buy people who didn't really like the idea of cars very much. People who objected to the connivence and extravagance of personal vehicles were overjoyed to be able to make a sacrifice to show the world just where their values lie. But a Tesla requires no such sacrifice. And that fact has enabled it to break into the mainstream in a way that neither the EV1, nor the MiEV, nor the Leaf nor any other electric car ever could.

The cost to provide the level of overservice expected by people for a 4 wheeled vehicle to meet the definition of a car is high. This high cost means that only a high end product can adequately serve this job. While Low end electric cars aren't able to do this and don't do it well, the Tesla does overserve and does it very well. This overservice is the key to the success of the Tesla. Given this, I'll be interested to see how they move downmarket and how successful they are at it.

[jwkr]

What do you think the parrot has been reading Proust? He got it from me!

Wiretap w Jonathan Goldstein

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Grammar Police

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Chicago by Carlos Aledo

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Chicago by Carlos Aledo

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Chicago by Carlos Aledo

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Chicago by Carlos Aledo

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Room with a view by François Viljoen

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stay away from lonely places by Margaret Vincent