Monday, November 09, 2009

'Military intelligence'? The joke's Hasan them.

So all the discussion over Ft. Hood and Hasan seems to be focusing in on whether the Army "missed any signs." Missed any signs? Are you freakin' kidding me? The guy spoke constantly against U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan (which he viewed as a "war against Islam"), tried repeatedly to get out of the Army, was strongly opposed to his deployment overseas, defended suicide bombings, told people he was "a Muslim first and an American second," gave away his furniture along with copies of the Qur'an right before the incident and, sort of anticlimactically, had received poor performance reviews for his work as a psychiatrist counseling soldiers (!). Now it comes out that he had ties to the same Virginia mosque that the 9/11 hijackers were attending just prior to their tribute to Allah in 2001.

What kind of "sign" did they need, exactly? Would he have had to come to work with dynamite strapped to his back, wearing a sandwich board that said ALL AMERICANS MUST DIE FOR ALLAH?

Saturday, November 07, 2009

A Saturday salmagundi.



In a society in which blacks, who constitute 12.8 percent of the population, commit 52 percent of the homicides and about a third of the forcible rapes (see, e.g., here and here), you think we'll ever see one of those paranoia-inducing Broadview Security ads with a black perp? I guess the odds are about as good as seeing a TV ad where the husband is the savvy one and the wife is the moron. .... Sorry, folks, I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

To be clear: This is from the guy
i.e., mewho has argued repeatedly for the elimination of race-consciousness; click on the "race" tag and check the blog over the past few years. But that means the politically correct kind of race-consciousness, too. You can't tell me that this wasn't discussed at Broadview, and that the company higher-ups didn't conceive these ads (and I've seen four different ones now) with the goal of not "offending" anyone. (Well, not quite anyone; you're always allowed to offend white males.)

==============================

Here's an article, "Sex Can Trigger Short-Term Amnesia."

Interestingly, short-term amnesia can also trigger sex...as in the case of politicians and baseball analysts who forget they're married*, teens who forget they're not on birth control, and celebs who forgot how many teens look up to them in the first place.

==============================

So on Tuesday, November 10, barring a last-minute stay, the State of Virginia will execute John Muhammad. Muhammad was convicted of masterminding the sniper spree that terrorized Beltway suburbs as well as, eventually, much of the Northeast back in 2002.

First of all, you can tell just by looking at this guy that he's a mess. A broken person. He's been a broken person for a long time. Which is precisely what his lawyers are arguing in their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. I know..."that's no excuse." But it always seemed to me that there should be a bright shining line between atrocities committed by crazy people and atrocities committed with the imprimatur of the State. A group of sane, sober-minded, law-abiding men and women sentenced this man to die, and on Tuesday another group of sane, sober-minded, law-abiding men and women will strap a human being onto a table, run an IV into his arm, and do what you do to hopeless animals. Then they'll head home and eat dinner, turn on the TV, laugh at some sitcom, and maybe end the night by going upstairs and working up a good case of short-term amnesia.

How do they live with that? Anyway, I find it sad. I repeat the quote from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo: "Society should not be in the business of elevating mankind's most base emotions to the status of law."

==============================

And, in further news from the religion of peace and love...

* and yes, occasionally, authors. I've addressed this before.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany?) Part 3.

What is something worth?

On its face, it's a pretty straightforward question. In a free-market setting, however, it turns out to be a trick question whose only meaningful answer sounds like a wisecrack: Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. This isn't just true for pork bellies, unloved household items that turn up on eBay, or rare works of art auctioned at Sotheby's. It applies to most of the basic staples of daily living
and it surely applies to what we call "luxuries." If tomorrow America decided en masse that it would buy no further diamond engagement rings until the per-carat price dropped to $79.93 for an absolutely flawless, colorless stone, the price of diamonds would settle at $79.93 per carat. This adjustment might not be painless; dislocations would ensue elsewhere in society. But if the American consumer's priority was to make diamonds cost $79.93 per carat, that is precisely what they would cost. The ultimate power resides with the consumer.

Things get somewhat more complicated when we're talking about highly manufactured items that are tied tightly to America's economic (and
labor) infrastructure. Gasoline, for example. Though we all bemoan the price of gas, once again, if Americans decided that gas prices should rewind to $.79 a gallon, that could certainly be made to happen. In this case, of course, there would be serious and possibly devastating consequences throughout society. But if reducing the price of gas to $.79 were the top priorityif nothing else mattered as muchthat outcome is within our grasp.

Today we see this phenomenon at work mostly in reverse: Millions of us all but insist on paying a lot of money for things
often useless things that would cost nothing in a world where items were ranked by function. We do this for reasons having to do with a statement we wish to make and/or a certain distance we wish to put between ourselves and mediocrity. (Conspicuous consumption is our preferred, albeit shallow, means of achieving this.) That proclivity either drives the price up or keeps the price up, depending on the item and the retail environment. Perhaps more important, this same phenomenon drives up or props up the retail cost of "lesser" versions of that Something. Like the $374,820 separating the Nissan from the Rolls, the vast monetary gulf between baseline items and their high-line counterparts creates, in any given realm, a silo of marketing opportunity for manufacturers. Within that solo, manufacturers can find price points for their respective products—products intentionally tiered to allow buyers to sort themselves out along the vanity scale. This practice is what adds a vanity tax to almost all goods (and services) in that silo except the ones at the very bottom. And sometimes those, too.

Let's be more specific and take a look at our
vanity tax at work.* Suppose a totally functional car can be manufactured for $12,500. An acceptable profit margin for such a car might be 15%, which means the car would retail for right around $15,000. If, however, the manufacturer knows that consumers want to pay $30,000 for such a car, then $30,000 is what that car will end up costing. (Vanity tax: $15,000.) And why would consumers want to pay $30,000 for a $15,000 car? Because there are Rolls Royces and Jaguars and Cadillacs that condition us to do so. Because those cars, at the top of the aforementioned silo, change our slant on the definition of car. Although upper-tier items like Rolls-Royces sell in minute numbersjust 261 were delivered to U.S. buyers last yearthey serve as artificial ceilings from which other manufacturers (and consumers) can "discount," thereby vastly expanding the dimensions of the ballpark. Ultimately, every item in that category of product or service will cost more than it needs to.

Put another way, if there were no Cadillacs at $50,000, then Buicks ("near-Caddys") wouldn't cost $35,000. I submit that every Cadillac sold adds maybe $1000 to the price of a Chevy, too.

Now let me be clear, lest the economists and other market-savvy types out there jump all over me. At least where cars are concerned, that extra $15,000 isn't just a huge hunk of gratuitous profit tacked onto the price of the vehicle; the consumer isn't literally being charged $30,000 for a car that was assembled for $12,500. Instead, the car maker elevates the base cost of the car far beyond $12,500 by using more costly components (say, titanium drive shafts and valve lifters) and adding other frills to "justify" the added cost. In today's manufacturing and labor climate, one does not have to try very hard to build a car in such a way that it must sell for $30,000 in order to return a profit: You just keep adding things until you get to the price the market expects to pay. But the fact that buyers are "getting what they pay for" when you tote up the cost of the constituent parts isn't the point. The point is that the car didn't need to be fashioned out of $30,000 worth of materials in order to yield a quality product that gets you from Point A to Point B.
The car maker has made a car that is intentionally "too expensive" because it knows that a fair number of buyers will not buy the car if it costs what a car, in its most basic sense, should cost. Buyers are determined to overspend in order to get from Point A to Point B.

That's why I said last time that your neighbor's Mercedes is costing you money. Also costing you money are: your neighbor’s big-screen TV, his closet full of designer-label suits (purchased at the swank men’s store in that stunning new lifestyle mall, thus further inflating the vanity tax for all parties), his multifeatured "shaving system," and on and on. We hear all sorts of complaints about this tax and that tax, but the one tax we're drowning in, as a culture, is the vanity tax.

* * * *

Historically, things acquired value because people wanted them—which is to say, the thing (or at least a desire for the thing, in the raw) preexisted the value. The worth of any given object or item evolved naturally in response to supply and demand. Because people liked the shiny stones with the yellowish hue, gold acquired significant value.

In post-Industrial Revolution America, we began artificially rigging and commodifying the value equation. We began creating things for the specific purpose of being valuable, thereby perverting the entire value equation. Now we confer value by fiat. The entry-level Manolo Blahnik Open-Toe Sandal at $575, having been assigned its cost, becomes desirable and valuable ipso facto. It is valuable because it was created to be thus. It's as if someone held up a lump of clay that no one particularly wanted, announced "This clay costs $50,000!", and suddenly people decided they "had to have it!" for that reason alone.

Having learned to equate (or confuse) status with quality and/or performance, most of us chronically overpay for products and services that provide little or no benefit in anything measurable or perceptible. We go into hock to buy elite, name-brand products that offer few if any real-world advantages for most users. The ultra-high-end camera provides no added benefits that are even likely to be noticed by someone who isn't already shooting film at the Richard Avedon level.
The basic Samsung at $90 would do him just fine. The difference between that and whatever he buys at, say, $490, is pure vanity tax. Same with high-end stereo. I'd be willing to bet that less than 1 in 100 people who buy the "home theater" systems showcased in audiophile stores can appreciate or even hear the subtle, esoteric differences in separation and other technological benefits that elevate these systems to their multi-thousand-dollar cost.

It's interesting to me that in times of recession, we talk about recession-proof occupations: nursing, for one. What makes these occupations recession-proof? We need them. We can't do without them, no matter how tough times get. At this juncture in history, till the field of robotics becomes much, much more advanced (and can make robots that are as robotic as many healthcare professionals), we can't do away with skilled healthcare workers. But it never seems to occur to anyone that America might need to make more recession-proof productswhich is to say, products that people can't do without. Nor does it seem to occur to people that we should focus our consuming appetites on those products: things that "do stuff," important stuff, for want of a more erudite way of saying it.

We don't produce enough of these things anymore.
The economic infrastructure is anchored in products and services (increasingly the latter) that people want, more than that they need. We have built a house of cards from the collective narcissism of a nation, and it is collapsing around us.

We'll wrap this up next time. I appreciate the forbearance of those who think we should've wrapped this up several posts ago.

Read previous post in this series.

* I grant you that this is an oversimplification. That's why I wanted to write the book. But I'm convinced that my argument holds in the overall.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany?) Part 2.

First of all, some of this will sound achingly familiar"another tiresome diatribe against conspicuous consumption, sigh, yawn"but I ask you to stay with it. It may develop a new level of traction for you as we move along.

===============================

I give you a pair of new 2009 vehicles (you can thank me later): a Nissan Altim
a 3.5 SE and a Rolls Royce Phantom. (The latter, by the way, is the vehicle-of-choice for Joe Vitale's $7500 inspirational ride-alongs.) Both zoom from a standing start to 60 mph in under 6 seconds. (Some so-called "enthusiast sites" claim to be able to bring the Altima in at under 5 seconds. That's downright Ferrari-esque.) Both manage a lateral acceleration of about .8g, meaning that they stay reasonably flat—and comparably flat—in corners. Braking is comparable, too, though the Nissan does appear to shed speed a bit quicker in panic stops.* Both cars seat five passengers comfortably.

One costs $25,180. The other, about $400,000. Plus $5400 for your gas-guzzler tax.

There are some major differences in performance. Notably, the Nissa
n gets about 30 miles per gallon, highway. Your new Rolls will eke out 15 mpg at best. (Hence the tax.) Make no mistake, the Phantom wins for creature comforts: meticulous hand assembly, a 420-watt stereo system, all that "Connolly leather" that once played such a prominent role in those stuffy Jag-you-are ads from the early '90s, and seemingly a few rainforests' worth of burnished, honest-to-gosh rosewood. The Rolls is also a few decibels quieter than the Nissan at highway speeds.

But...four-hundred-thousand dollars? Versus $25,000? To connect those familiar points, A and B? Do a handful of decibels here and a few slabs of rosewood there justify a tariff that would buy you a veritable fleet of Nissans
? (And anyway, a high-output stereo system and a "buttery-soft" leather interior can be had on the Nissan for an additional $1700, total.) And consoling as it might be to enshroud yourself in a leather cocoon while cruising at speeds limited by legal and practical considerations to half of what either car's superfluous horsepower can deliver, what do such extras do for you, anyway? With advantages that intangible, you almost wonder if the name Phantom is the car maker's sly joke on its well-heeled owners. In terms of anything that can actually be measured or quantified and has a direct bearing on transportation efficiency, the cars are equal. Except where the nod goes to the Nissan.

Here's another way of looking at the foregoing: Only the first $25,180 of the Phantom's sticker price goes towards the vehicle's inherent function (i.e. being a car). In strict transportation terms, what "function" is purchased by the other $374,820? There isn't any. The buyer is not paying any of that $374,820 "for a car." He already bought the car with the first $25,180**. So what should we call that added $374,820?

In my pitch last year for a book that apparently will never be written or published***, I proposed to call it a "vanity tax." This vanity tax is the amount we willingly (often eagerly) pay
over and above what we need to payin order to obtain the basic functionality we seek in any given product, service or realm. For whole categories of consumer items, the vanity tax is 100 percent, because the products aren't needed. At all. I don't care how bad you think you look in the morning, you don't need mascara. Therefore, the cost of mascara, however nominal you may consider it to be in the overall landscape of your budget, is pure vanity tax. 100 percent.

What's more, the aspiration to Rolls-ian luxury is the rising tide that lifts all cars (or at least their MSRPs) as well as the prices of thousands of other consumer goods and services. Though I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, I think I can do a pretty good job of showing that your neighbor's snazzy new Mercedes is costing you money. We'll walk through that next time. For now I just want to leave that tantalizing thought in your mind: Every time your neighbor buys a fancy car (or stereo system, or tailored suit, etc.), you're paying for part of it. Every time you buy a fancy car or stereo or suit, your neighbor pays for part of it.

Whaddya know! Obama or no Obama, we're a socialist economy already!

A variant of this same phenomenon explains why cars look the way they do. It is no accident that a Ford Focus looks like, well, a Ford Focus. If automakers wanted to make a vehicle that looks more like a Corvette but costs more like a Focus, they could easily do so. It's just sheet metal. But by now we all know what status looks like, so if you want status, you have to pay for it. This is a patent and calculated attempt on the auto industry's part to extract money from consumers in exchange for...nothing. Nothing that actually does anything. Status is the one vehicular component that has the highest resale value to many Americans, and few manufacturers are going to just give it away. Even though in functional terms, that part of the car is totally inert.

Consider, too, women's shoes. We've talked about this before, but those sexy $600 high heels with the red soles are not "better shoes" than the $29 flats available at Payless, i
f we're using as our benchmark the textbook function of a shoe. As a class, in fact, high-line stilettos and other "fashionable shoes" may rank among the worst shoes. They're often less comfortable to wear, they can cause permanent foot damage, they're less safe in other ways (how fast do you imagine you can run in them, if, say, you're fleeing a would-be rapist?), and you can't even assume that they'll last longer (there are anecdotal reports of much-ballyhooed Jimmy Choo shoes coming apart at the seams in a very short period of time). So the lousy shoe
which is to say, the shoe that does the worst job of being an actual shoe—often costs more. But women fork over $600 so they can cross their legs at work and let their female coworkers ogle the red soles.

Nowadays almost all products cost more than is necessary to fulfill a product's basic function—assuming it has one. (What's the function of a pendant? Even a $39 pendant? It has none.) Whole categories of items and services exist for the sole purpose of enabling buyers to pay more than they'd have to if all they sought was a serviceable car, coat, camera, TV, handbag, vacation, golf lesson, et cetera. Whole industries are happily and profitably engaged in the ongoing business of providing a useless product (again, by our strict definition of "use": Does it do anything? Anything that requires doing?) It is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that the economy would collapse tomorrow (worse than it already has)—a mass implosion of the NYSE, led by many of America’s best-known brands—if consumers today began consuming products based on utility. What a remarkable statement.

Next time, in Part 3: The small picture.

Read Part 1.

* I had trouble pinning down an exact stopping distances figures for the Phantom; perhaps Rolls owners do not trouble themselves with such minutiae. But a variety of Web references make the two cars appear generally comparable, with 60-to-zero distances of between 125 and 130 feet.
**
And one could plausibly argue that there's no reason to even spend $25,180 on a car in the first place.
*** It's another one of those long stories.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

I'm huge in Australia.

Here's a little thing your host did for ABC-Australia radio that just went up on their site. I prattle on at times, and there's one point where I sort of get caught up in my own syntax (which won't surprise any of you who read this blog religiously), but if you're looking for something to fill an hour between the football game and the World Series, you might give it a shot. Although the nominal topic is "envy," there's some interesting banter on women's magazines, men's magazines, body image, the James Ray tragedy, etc.

I've done some nice media work for the Aussies, and they've actually stuck with me and SHAM longer than most of our major markets here, in terms of offering me mass-market exposure. They're probably still guilt-ridden over having unleashed Rhonda Byrne on an unsuspecting world...

If it quacks like a quack...

Perhaps all we need to know about Suzanne Somers' much-hyped new book, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancerand How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place, is that the foreword was supplied by one Julian Whitaker, MD. I wrote about Whitaker a while back, when he was claiming that he knew how to permanently cure COPD in two weeks or less.

He has also variously clai
med that he:

  • knew how to cure asthma in four days.
  • knew how to reverse macular degeneration "instantly."
  • could get rid of osteoporosis by applying a "special" topical ointment.
  • was in possession of a mineral that could erase someone's Parkinson's Disease during a 20-minute office visit. And to think, poor Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali have suffered needlessly all this time!
I concede that I haven't read Somers' book. And since I also skipped her previous best-seller, Breakthrough, a dissertation on the general topic of health and wellness, I guess I feel obliged to get around to reading this one. In general I try to put off such tasks as long as possible in the interest of safeguarding my own blood pressure. I just find these works so infuriatingall the more so because they tend to become instant best-sellers, as we learned with our friend Kevin Trudeau and his unspeakably venal Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About.

Why do we prefer to take advice on important medical topics from former sitcom bimbos who then did soft-porn-inflected infomercials for exercise equipment, rather than from own family doctor, or even, say, from a book like this one? Why are there so many people out there in this grand land of ours who seem to feel that the farther information is from the mainstream, the more credible it therefore is? I do not understand that syndrome or that mindset.

Incidentally, if you don't see the parallels between this and the kind of reckless, baseless stuff James Ray was (quite successfully) peddling in the name of emotional growth/health...then you're not looking nearly hard enough.

(Yes, I'm still working on Part 2 of Tiffany Epiphany. And I mention this only because a few of you have asked.)

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany?) Part 1.

So I'm in Tiffany & Co. the other day, killing time (it's a long story), when I noticed the pendant shown at left. I asked to see it. Perhaps because I was wearing the same sweatshirt I wear when I'm grading my team's home field after a day of rain, the salesgirlwho was nine feet tall, rail-thin, and so ultra-made-up that I figured she was either about to audition for America's Top Model or running an ad for her personal services on Craigslist—eyed me skeptically. But lacking a legitimate reason to refuse, and perhaps suspecting that she was being mystery-shopped, she agreed to show it to me.

It was a nice
pendant. Very shiny. That much I will not deny. It had little diamond chips spaced along the chain.* I did not see a price tag.

"So how much is it?" I asked, thereby (a) violating the old J.P. Morgan dictum about elite-level shopping and (b) resolving any doubts the salesgirl may still have had about my unworthiness.

Keeping her composure, she replied matter-of-factly, "Eleven-hundred-ninety-five
dollars."

"No, you misunderstand," I replied. "I don't want the whole display case. Just the one pendant." OK, I didn't really say that. I do have some degree of savoir faire. But I sure thought it as I gingerly handed the thing back to her.

A few hours later I happened to be in Walmarttalk about culture shock!—where I saw lots of other people who looked as if they'd just come from grading ball fields. And just for the hell of it I went over to Jewelry, where I discovered the item shown at right. It had a nice big price tag on it, plain as day. Now this may surprise you, but it wasn't even $1000. Imagine that! Actually it was $39.95. And if you look closely, you'll notice it even has a shiny little "diamond" near the point.

And at that instant a thought struck me: It occurred to me that the $1195 Tiffany pendant has no purpose except to be affordable only to people who can afford things most other people can't. It exists to be overpriced; that is its raison d'etre. It doesn't do anything that the $40 Walmart model can't do. (In fact neither pendant does anything, a separate but related issue that we'll get to next time.) It makes no tangible, measurable contribution to the progress of humankind. To my eye, it isn't even prettier than the cheapo version. Maybe it was a tad shinier, because one gets the feeling the folks in Tiffany's are polishing their jewelry every 18 seconds in order to sustain the chic vibe. I don't think the Walmart personnel worry quite as much about display appeal; I draw this inference based in part on the fact that a 2-for-1 package of drain cleaner that someone had decided not to buy sat prominently on the corner of the Walmart jewelry counter. None of the sales staff seemed to regard its removal as a priority.

Still, I wasn't buying the drain cleaner. I was buying (or at least looking at) the pendant. The ambiance was irrelevant. Wasn't it?

The desire for glitter and gaud, for status in general, is nothing new. But we in America have broadened the practice and elevated it to an art form. We spent the 20th Century fastidiously detaching value from function, a process that continued apace into the 21st century.

That process continued even
as the nation's financial infrastructure stood at near-collapse. The two are not, I think, unrelated.

In Part 2: How this is killing America.


* Total weight .21 carat, according to the specs. On a wholesale basis these are very inexpensive, proportionally, compared to large intact diamonds.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Mass will be held in the sweat lodge on Sunday at 9.

Yesterday I received a republication request from the Catholic Education Resource Center, better known (to those who know anything at all about Catholic publications, that is) simply as CERC. CERC wants to reprint my Journal article on the increasingly embattled James Ray. This is actually the second time they've picked up one of my pieces, the first time also being a Journal essay, in that case on happiness.

I'm a little thrown by this new request, however. I gave my OK, of course
you can see the piece here if you care tobut I'm puzzled as to why they'd want to run it to begin with, since I'd think the parallels between (a) the New Age and (b) religious dogmatism of the sort long identified with the Catholic hierarchy might be uncomfortably close for some CERC readers. Blind, unreasoned faith, after all, is blind, unreasoned faith, regardless of the venue, the size of the room, or how many neat hats and robes the people up front are wearing. Also, clearly, the folks at CERC haven't spent much time on SHAMblog, or they would have run across that rant from just a few days ago about my early indoctrination in Catholicism and related unpleasantries.

I have a feeling that the editors at CERC, probably not unlike the leadership of the Church itself, are afflicted with that peculiar myopia that allows people in certain walks of life to be judgmental of people in other walks of life, even when they're doing much the same thing as the people they're judging. I'd imagine that in the aftermath of the Ray debacle, priests are looking at the New Age and its gurus, tsking and thinking, "Now isn't that ridiculous. And so unnecessary! Who could've put their trust in something like that?" I dare say there were probably hundreds of homilies on the topic this past Sunday across America, along with the usual prayers offered up for victims of tragedy.

Kinda like George Bush laughing at someone else's stupidity, or ol' Charlie Manson shaking his head and saying, "Man, that Ted Bundy is batshit crazy, ain't he?"*

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This is an amazing story, and one of the more stop-you-in-your-tracks visuals I've seen in a long time. I don't know that it signifies what we, in our relentless anthropomorphism, would like it to signify. Or maybe I'm just too full of human hubris to appreciate the moment for what it is. Still...it's quite something.

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Finally, today, can anyone tell me why Reese Witherspoon has a fragrace? Seriously. Reese Witherspoon? Was there a need for this? Do women actually wake up thinking, "Gee, I wish I smelled more like Reese Witherspoon. Then life would ge good"? What's next? Will Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter get a scent of his own? ... Oh, wait a minute....

* OK, OK, no angry ripostes required here. I know I'm overstating. But you see my point, no?