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AI is (gonna be) SO Awesome

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Politics, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on AI is (gonna be) SO Awesome

I will start this post with what would have likely been the opening line in a post about the internet that I have yet to write:

Search engines today are shit.

 

Google, Bing, or Duck-Duck-Go, my current default, it does not matter, they are all nearly useless. The reason is not hard to determine, their job is not to aid you in finding stuff, if it ever was, it is to keep you hopping around the internet, hopefully clicking on things that will get them paid a bit, then eventually getting you to buy shit. I estimate at this point that at least 60% of the sites on the www have only one purpose – to sell people shit. The internet is going to converge to 100% dedicated to selling shit, eventually, as the internet becomes the only advertising/marketing platform anyone uses.

Anyway, that is the simple explanation for why search engines on the web suck, what I find harder to understand is why non-commercial search engines also suck. I have a membership in the London Public Library, and as a retired faculty member I have access to everything in the university library system.

To find anything, I have to use their online search engines, as card catalogs disappeared years ago.

Well, their in-house search engines suck, too.

An extended example for you.

I go to the UWO library catalogue search engine (ominously called ‘UWO Libris Discovery’), log in with my credentials, and type in “Richard J Evans”. He’s a noted historian, specializing in German history, and I have read some of his books on the 3rd Reich. The first entry is some chemistry paper, ok, fair enough, there is a chemist with the same name, and so I re-type, adding “history” to my search query. Now I do get an initial page of references to 10 different things written by the person in which I am interested. However, at the top of the page it says

“1-10 of 199,282 results”

Jeezus. Evans is prolific, but no way has he written that much of……anything.

Curious now, I skip to page 5 of these many many results (at 10 entries per page, there are 20,000 pages to check if I want), and find more things written by Richard J Evans, but the second result on page 5 is “US Marines and Irregular Warfare” written by one Stephen S. Evans.

Well, if you include anything with Evans in it, and then maybe anything with Richard, the results are indeed going to pile up, but…..why?

Were I using a card catalogue, once I’d looked at all the cards with “Richard J Evans” as author I would stop and move on.

Can’t do that here, have to go through all the Stephen Evans, etc, because there are more Richard J Evans entries after that, and if I were to go on to page 283, well….what would I find? ( I looked ahead a bit, page 8 had an entry on the history of ranching by one Simon Evans. Bloody hell….)

Anyway, all this is to say that even search engines without advertising suck, and I really miss card catalogues, the Yellow Pages and businesses that answer their telephones. [A positive note. The search engines on the websites of the Globe and Mail and Wall Street Journal work pretty well. So it can be done.]

One might…..well, I might….think the generally agreed shittiness of search engines would lead to careful thinking about how to make them better. No, no, what we do now is seek to replace the shitty thing with something else that is shitty in a new and different way.

Here is a quote from a column in the WSJ in which the author explains at length why she stopped using Google for search, and switched to AI:

“While I’m in favor of shifting the stale search paradigm, I do have AI reservations. These systems hoover up answers from the internet, but rarely push you to the original source.

Your trusted sources of information—like this very publication—stand to lose visibility, subscribers and traffic. If too many online platforms suffer, we’ll end up losing the open web in exchange for one big answer machine with zero citations or accountability.”

But other than that, using AI for search is just peachy, right?

The leader of the discussion group on the US election that I was part of last Fall was a retired academic, like me. He said two remarkable things in the course of our six sessions, as we discussed the US Presidential election.

  1. “I do not pay for news.”
  2. “I learn a lot about the election by watching the late night TV comedy shows”.

You can perhaps imagine the knowledge base this man brought to bear on our discussions of the US election.

Soon, it will be unnecessary to spend all that time watching late night comedians, we will be able to simply type into ChatGPT – “Who is the best candidate?”

Way better, clearly.

 

What Does it Mean?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Popular attitudes. 1 Comment on What Does it Mean?

There is a T-intersection near the back of my property line, where recently the city, in its infinite wisdom, put a controlled crosswalk. You know, one of those where the pedestrians push a button and a set of flashing yellow lights come on, supposedly stopping traffic. People have been crossing here safely, although not in large numbers, for the 20 years I have lived in this house. Never been a pedestrian so much as nicked, so far as I know, and I would know.

Whatever. The other day I left my house and headed downtown, a walk which involves my crossing that same street. I walked to the curb, perhaps 30 yards south of the new crosswalk, saw no cars coming from either direction (one can see a looong way in both directions on that street) and so walked across. Just as I stepped off the curb, a young fellow (in his 20s, I would say) stepped up to the new crosswalk, pushed the button, and waited for the yellow lights to flash before crossing the street. I could not stop myself, I said ‘oh my god’ out loud.

This caused me to remember something I saw happen on my old employer’s campus all the time. By now every building has one or more doors to the outside that can be opened by an electro-hydraulic system. You just push a button on either side of the door, and wait, and the door slowly swings open. This allows, for example, people in wheel chairs to go through the door unaided. It is common to see a student or group of students, all 20-something and perfectly healthy, walk up to such a door, push the button, and stand there and wait for the door to sloooowly open before walking through.

I have on several occasions walked by those students, yanked the door open using, you know, my rather old arm, and walked past them. No indication it phases them in the least.

Letting the hydraulics open the door of course leaves said door open for a loooong time, so as to give a person in a wheelchair time to get through it before the mechanism sloooowly closes it. This allows plenty of cooled air to leave the building in the summer and a long gust of cold air to enter the building in the winter. Lovely.

I don’t know what to think of this behavior – I have more questions than answers.

One, is this a youth thing or perhaps a Canadian thing? I have long noticed that Canadians are more likely than Americans to stand on a street corner devoid of any traffic and wait for the pedestrian signal to say ‘Walk’ before crossing. Are American university students also likely to let the electrical system open doors for them, or less so? Are older people – like me – less likely to behave in these ways?

Is this an indication that we have raised a generation of sheep who can do nothing without official permission, or who are too lazy to use their limbs?

I dunno, but I find it…..depressing.

Any thoughts welcome.

Super Bud Light Debacle   

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, LBOs, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Super Bud Light Debacle   

Whether you are a sports fan or not, you probably know that Super Bowl Roman Numerals is going to happen on Sunday. As an actual fan of Uhmurikan football, I plan to watch it, along with millions of others who only watch this one game each year. You probably also know that much of what is written about the Super Bowl every year is actually about the commercials. Firms spend stratospheric amounts for a 15-second spot during this event, and they also spend a lot producing commercials to be shown during the SB that they hope everyone will talk about for days and weeks afterward.

This morning I was reading an article in The Free Press titled ‘The Sad Saga of Bud Light’, written by one Anson Frericks, who spent 11 years as a top executive at Anheuser-Busch InBev, the multi-national company that produces and sells beer all over the world, including here in Canada, where it owns Labatt Brewing, Limited, the largest brewer in the country. Frericks notes that there will be a Bud Light commercial shown during the game, and suggests that it is an attempt by AB InBev, the maker of said beer, to say ‘Sorry’.

Sorry about what? According to Frericks, about what happened back in 2023 (ancient history, I know) when AB InBev launched an advertising campaign for Bud Light that featured a ‘transgender influencer’ named Dylan Mulvaney. So, full disclosure. I do not and never have drank Bud Light, because it has two problems associated with it. Those would be the ‘Bud’ and the ‘Light’. I like beer, but Budweiser is fizzy yellow water that bears a distant resemblance to beer in my estimation, and beer labelled ‘Light’ is like yogurt labelled ‘nonfat’. It isn’t yogurt if it has no fat in it, and it isn’t beer if you added water to it to get the alcohol content down.

But that’s just me, as prior to the ad campaign mentioned above, which launched on April 1, 2023, Bud Light had the highest sales revenue of any beer in the US.

I remember discussions, some heated, most amused, about this ad campaign when it came out, but honestly paid little attention. I do not understand why having some nominally well-known person in a commercial for any product has any impact on anyone’s decision to consume that product. Morgan Freeman, Peyton Manning, Jennifer Garner or Dylan Mulvaney, I am not interested in their views of or association with anything I might consume. Apparently that makes me odd, but we already knew that.

I also knew some kind of boycott of Bud Light was proclaimed by somebody after those ads appeared. Didn’t drink the stuff, didn’t care, but honestly my guess was that it would all blow over as these things do, and the folks who liked Bud Light for reasons I do not understand would go back to drinking it eventually.

Well, according to this Free Press article by Mr. Frericks, I could not be more wrong, and this is what prompted me to write this column.

Here is what he claims, and I have not verified these numbers, but I expect one could.

“Bud Light sales declined 11 percent that week compared to the previous year. By April 15, 2023, sales were down 21 percent. In the ensuing months, the company shed billions of dollars of shareholder value, laid off hundreds of employees across the Anheuser-Busch ecosystem, damaged its reputation, and plunked itself in the middle of a highly contentious political issue.”

Then later he writes –

“Nearly two years later, Bud Light has yet to win beer lovers back; sales remain roughly 40 percent below where they were before the boycott began.”

40 per cent? Really? That’s astounding. That’s big.

Today, according to the article, Bud Light is the third-largest selling brand of beer in the US, after Modelo and Michelob Ultra. Even worse, if you were an AB-InBev shareholder, on March 31, 2023, the day before the Mulvaney campaign launched, AB InBev stock was $66 per share with a market capitalization of $132 billion. Today, the stock price is $49 a share with a market cap of $87 billion, a loss of over $40 billion in value.

Clearly, my original thought that the kerfuffle would end and Bud Light sales would revive was rather wrong. That ad campaign apparently did do some long-term serious damage to the company that ran it. (I hasten to add that we cannot look at the counterfactual: what would sales of Bud Light be today if that ad campaign had not happened? It is entirely possible that other things – good marketing by Modelo, for example – have something to do with the fall in Bud Light sales.)

The Free Press article (you can read it here) goes on to document the path AB-InBev took to get to that point, starting with the appointment of a new CEO, Michel Doukeris, in July of 2021. Frericks lays out the re-orientation of AB-InBev in a new direction, emphasizing ESG and DIE initiatives, that Doukeris led.

Leaving aside my or anyone else’s views of all that sort of thing (and I surely do have a view), it seems to me the most salient question one can ask about this is: what in the hell were these people thinking?

To put it differently, how can the CEO of a multi-national corporation like AB-InBev not realize what an utterly idiotic idea it was to have a ‘transgender influencer’ promoting Bud Light??!! How can anyone – never mind someone being paid an eye-watering salary (plus bonuses, plus…plus…) to run this company – be so hopelessly clueless about the company’s product and customers?

I am sure plenty of folks will point at the whole ‘woke’ mindset as the cluelessness culprit here,  and I can imagine that played a role, but I also strongly suspect it is deeper than that. However woke Mr. Doukeris and his fellow C-suite inhabitants might be, I wonder if he ever spent a moment of his time working in the business of making, distributing or selling beer. Did he even drink Bud Light when no reporters were around?

His Wikipedia bio says he has a degree in chemical engineering and post-graduate degrees from U Penn’s Wharton Business School and Northwestern’s Kellog School of Management. He joined AB-InBev in Brazil in 1996, when he would have been 23 years old, but it doesn’t say what he did. I’m betting he wasn’t driving a delivery truck, but I suppose it is possible he was a chemical engineer in one of their breweries to begin his career. However, he seems to have quickly become a rising star in the company, which meant leaving behind any actual association with the business in which AB-InBev was engaged. There lies the path to cluelessness.

So, woke or otherwise, his foolish approval of this ad campaign (with blame to be shared by Alissa Heinerscheid, whom Doukeris had apparently promoted to vice president of marketing) was a clear disaster for AB-InBev’s bottom line. And, here’s the thing – he is still the company CEO.

When I read about people railing against the inefficiency of government, typically asserting that ‘in the private sector if you make bad decisions there are consequences, dammit!’, I think of stories like this one.

In the 21st century, in any LBO, private or public, non-profit or commercial, there are rarely any consequences for fucking up. At least, when you are near enough to the top of the LBO hierarchy.

You do want to be very near the top, however. The article also notes that

“Alissa Heinerscheid was placed on leave in April 2023. According to her LinkedIn profile, she now works with LIV Golf, the professional golf league underwritten by Saudi Arabia.”

Yea, I know. Ms Heinerscheid is in no danger of starving. Do you suppose Saudi-backed LIV Golf has a DIE department? I’m gonna have one of my interns look into that.

On Sin

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Health Care, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on On Sin

I recently did a post about disability accommodations at Canadian Universities, in which ADHD diagnoses played a prominent role. ADHD is far from the only non-physical disability whose presence in universities has increased greatly, but it is up there. After writing that, I was reading a post in a blog which I have come to find very interesting, called On the Contrary, written by a fellow named Simon Sobo. He bills himself as ‘81 year old unheralded, frustrated, but serious writer’.

The particular post I read was titled ‘ADHD and Other Sins of Our Children, Part 2’, and you can read it here. Free. (There is a Part 1, which I have not yet read, and which opens with the remark that Part 2 has been read five times as often as Part 1. Hmmm…..)

The post is quite long, and the first section of it is sub-titled A Memory. It’s an interesting account of how his Jewish parents raised him, and his attempts to behave as they wished him to, especially during a long sermon by the Rabbi in his synagogue. My own Catholic upbringing was not dissimilar. The penultimate section of the article is subtitled ‘Sin and ADHD’ and starts with this sentence:

“First a few interesting statistics about adults diagnosed with ADHD and their sense of moral responsibility.”

It makes for fascinating reading, although the academic in me wishes Sobo had done a better job of providing citations for those stats. (There is a set of serious references at the end of the article, which I intend to pursue).

Anyway, I found it thought-provoking, and think you might, also.

You Should Read This  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Popular attitudes. No Comments on You Should Read This  

Really.

….assuming, that is, that you have not already read enough post-mortems about the recent US election.

I came across this post in my meandering around the internet:

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives

(click on the title to go there, no paywall)

It’s one post on a blog called Symbolic Capital(ism), written by a sociologist named Mussa Al-Gharbi.

Disclaimer: It is very long, and full of data, much of it from exit polls and surveys, the reliability of which we all know is iffy, and I am not saying it is brilliant or fundamentally correct, as I have not (yet) taken the time to dig into it deeply. And…I usually have little use for sociologists. And, a lot of the analysis comes from a book Al-Gharbi just published, which he plugs shamelessly at the end. Hey, we all gotta make a living.

But, man, it is comprehensive, and well-written, and definitely not the usual bullshit. It has given me enough things to think hard about to last a long time. And I might have to buy his damned book.

AI and the End of Thinking

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Language, Popular attitudes, Standards. 1 Comment on AI and the End of Thinking

I hypothesize that the topic that comes in second after the US election in the news is AI. So, this post is about me….cuz in most fonts, Al and AI are indistinguishable.

This was prompted by a long article in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail Opinion section, titled

The Automation of Writing is Almost Here

Followed by the tag line:

‘But what will happen to us, Michael Harris asks, if we cede our written language to AI?’

It is a long article, and Harris makes a number of points, all of which I basically agree with.

As to what is wrong with AI writing, he says “There is the shape of meaning and yet nothing solid.”

I would only add that this can also be said about most bureaucratic writing from universities, government, corporations. Indeed, AI makes all writing sound bureaucratic – only the shape of meaning.

He typifies the coming of AI as the third great revolution in communication, the first being writing itself, the second the invention of the printing press.

Another quote: “Passing around pre-fabricated blocks of text is efficient, to be sure, but it also makes a mockery of the word ‘communicate’….”

Again, I cannot disagree, except perhaps to wonder at what ‘efficient’ means in that context. It is easy, yes, but efficient?

As someone who taught a lot of what my employer deigned to call ‘Essay courses’ (simply meaning student grades were determined by my evaluation of a minimum number of their written words), I said to those students often that ‘writing is thinking’. I meant it, even though most of them didn’t like what that implied. Thinking is hard, so writing well is also hard. Students….no, humans….are pretty ingenious at avoiding things that are hard. That’s not necessarily a moral failing. Well, it is when it gets people hurt or killed, but it is also probably part of our evolutionary heritage. Struggling along on the savannah, smaller. slower and weaker than most of what we wanted to eat, our ancestors absolutely had to conserve their energy in any way they could, so as to have a hope of winning a battle against a tougher, stronger and faster opposing animal.

The instinct to conserve energy seems to have survived, the need to best superior predators, not so much.

There is another vein of thought about AI and language that I have read about but which Harris ignores. So far as I understand it, it is that AI generated language is destined to turn into meaningless mush, eventually. It has something to do with the fact that AI will increasingly find itself training itself on a mountain of verbiage out there on the web which it has increasingly generated itself, and this process is inherently unstable. Here’s two sentences from the Abstract of a paper about this, titled ‘The Curse of Recursion’

“What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.”

It doesn’t say what those ‘irreversible defects’ are but some simple examples in the paper suggest that as a LLM (Large Language Model) is trained successively on text that it generated itself, the output it produces becomes what we would now call gibberish.

Given what I write below, I would call that good news.

My own concern with these LLMs follows from what I see their owners selling them for already. It is an extension of the same concern I had the few times students used AI for their writing in the last years of my career. I came upon these recent AI sales pitches because I watch sports online, and the commercials are mostly those that are broadcast on US TV. The ones I am going to talk about below are all, so far as I can remember, from Apple Intelligence, the cleverly named AI wing of Apple.

I recall three such TV ads.

  1. A guy enters a business meeting, sits down, and quickly realizes he has no idea what is going on. He quietly scoots his wheeled chair out the door, checks on his phone for what I assume was the original emailed materials for the meeting, and hits the ‘AI’ button on his program. The algorithm immediately gives him a ‘summary’ of said material. He smiles, slides himself slowly back into the meeting, and says ‘OK, let’s get into the prospectus’.

Lesson: You don’t have to prepare for anything, and you certainly don’t have to study. AI will prepare you in seconds.

  1. A guy is sitting at his desk, thinking out loud about something that is never clearly described. He speaks some garbled thoughts into his phone, hits the AI button, and his gibberish is turned into a paragraph of clear prose, which he sends to someone (his boss, it appears). Boss reads it, looks up and says something like ‘This is from Gibberish-guy?’.

Lesson: You don’t have to write or even think clearly, just say something, anything, and AI will make it brilliant.

  1. A guy (natch) is incensed about someone stealing his pudding cup from the office fridge, and he is writing an inflammatory email to the entire office, castigating whoever was asshole enough to steal it, and promising dire consequences if it is not returned. Before hitting Send he looks at the Teddy Bear sitting across the office from him (No, there were no teddy bears in the office when I worked, either) and hits the ‘Kindness’ button on his AI program. The email is duly transformed, he sends it, and a young lady walks over to his desk, says ‘Such beautiful words.’ and returns his stolen pudding cup.

Lesson: You don’t have to emotionally regulate or understand proportionality, AI will make you seem like a nice (and articulate) person.

If AI is going to self-referentially crash some day, I say bravo. I fear however that the message to most of my fellow humans prior to that is that it will eliminate the need for them to think, be articulate, prepared, or an adult, and that will be too attractive to resist. However, I will have to interact with those people in situations in which they cannot rely on AI. In line at the grocery store, out for a walk, sitting at the bar. Doing so will be extremely unpleasant, because without their AI they will be ignorant, inarticulate and angry.  Unless they let their phone do their talking for them.

That’ll be great.

 

 

Dammit, This is Important!

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Dammit, This is Important!

This is going to be a rant – unusual for me, I know – but a short one. I am working on a much longer rant for the coming days, so you’ve been warned.

I refer you to The London Free Press, November 21, Letters to the Editor. One letter is headed Timing Offensive.

The author is offended that the Freeps published an article headlined ‘We don’t want to know about abused men’ on Nov 9. I quote from the outraged letter:

“You have 11 other months of the year to publish that article, and yet you chose to run it in the one month dedicated to the Shine The Light on Women Abuse campaign.

Are the editor and editor-in-chief that insensitive, or worse, misogynistic?”

Misogynistic, clearly. I mean, it’s obvious, right?

I surmise that it was the publishing of an article about abuse of males during a month when someone decreed that we should focus on abuse of females that drew the writer’s ire. Would an article about the Movember prostate cancer thing have been equally offensive? I surmise not, as I suspect there were articles in the Freeps about Movember that did not outrage the letter-writer. No, I haven’t looked…..

More fundamentally, what is the actual nature of the offense, here? As far as one can tell from the letter, most of which I have reproduced above, as it was not long, the offense is thinking about, writing about, and publishing an article about, other types of abuse. So, our attention must not stray from the abuse of women during November, not even for the length of time it takes to read that offensive article.  And apparently, if the Freeps had published the article on Dec 1 the author would not have been upset, December presumably falling under the ’11 other months’ designation.

However, it is also true that someone somewhere, I know not who or how, did designate November as a month to support/discuss/sympathize with (I really don’t know what we’re supposed to do beyond growing a moustache) men who have prostate cancer. Should I then be offended if the Freeps publishes an article on breast cancer this month? What about skin cancer? I won’t be, but is that lack of outrage a moral failing on my part?

Sadly, this is pretty much how many people see things. They have a cause. The war in Gaza, misogyny, racism, cruelty to animals. This then becomes the most important thing there is to think and talk about, not just for oneself, but for everyone.  One then patrols their chosen territory assiduously, outraged by any and all perceived actions by anyone anywhere that might suggest that one’s favourite issue is not supremely important. (There are also people for whom this is a job description. They’re called ‘advocates’, they get tons of media attention, and are a topic for another post someday.)

Students camp out on the concrete beach (ok, how many were actually UWO students is not clear) and harass passersby and graduates because nothing is more important than their stand on the war in Gaza. Not your fellow students, not the ability of other people to live their lives without being shouted at, and never mind that your silly encampment and juvenile harassment has zero chance of having any impact on what happens in Gaza. This issue is important to me, to the exclusion of all else – including going to class or earning a living – and so it must be equally important to all right-thinking people. Any person who does not see the paramount importance of my issue, well – they must be a, a, a….misogynist.

So it is with this offended letter writer. It does not occur to her that if the appearance of that story in the Freeps (of all places) actually had any detrimental impact on the Shine the Light campaign, maybe said campaign is doomed.

 

Young and Rogan, Again

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, London, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Young and Rogan, Again

London, Ontario has a number of outdoor musical events each summer, one of which is known as Rock the Park. When the line-up for this festival was announced a long time ago, it was regarded as quite the coup to have scored Neil Young and Crazy Horse as a headline performer. I’m not sure booking any 78-year-old rocker should be regarded as a major coup, but what brought this all to mind was the very recent announcement, just weeks before the event is to occur, that Young and the band have cancelled their appearance.

I wrote a post awhile back about Neil Young’s recent return to Spotify, thereby abandoning his principled position that what was being said on Joe Rogan’s podcast (streamed on Spotify) was false and harmful.

My focus there was on the fact that Young had shown, in my view, a meaningful commitment to a principle by taking an income hit as a result of pulling his music from Spotify, but that he had, in the light of Rogan’s new, wider streaming contract decided that he would not pay an even higher price by pulling his music from other platforms.

There is another, separate issue this raises, which I want to write about here. Why did Young do what he did back in 2022, rather than other things he could have done in response to what he saw as Rogan’s spread of false information? As I noted in my previous post, pulling his music from Spotify was undoubtedly costly to Young, but it seems likely it cost Spotify very little, if anything. I just don’t imagine that many people dropped their Spotify subscriptions in response to Young’s 2022 departure. But even if a significant number did, why do that?

One could imagine that Young anticipated that his departure from Spotify would indeed lead to the cancellation of many Spotify subscriptions, and that, seeing this, Spotify would in turn terminate their contract with Rogan. I really don’t believe Young anticipated that, but suppose he did. That would mean that Young’s purpose was to eliminate Rogan’s platform for disseminating ideas that Young disliked – that, to quote him, “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.” (I’m taking this quote from the original WSJ article, so am assuming it is accurate.)

This seems to me a very 21st century instinct. If someone is saying/writing things to which one objects, one should do what one can to shut them up. Stop them from saying those objectionable things. Now, the Young quote goes on to assert that if people hear these objectionable things and believe them, they could potentially die.

Certainly, preventing people from dying is a noble goal, but that is not what Young’s move would have done, had it been successful in getting Rogan off Spotify. It would have stopped people from hearing what was said there (ignoring for the moment possible other platforms), but I don’t see how one can really assert that would have saved lives. That only follows if one views exposure to what is said on Rogan’s podcasts as a disease itself, which kills people. In fact, what happens, is that people listen to it, they think about it – or not – then they take what they heard, along with all the other things they have ever heard that they think might be relevant, and they go on with their lives. They make decisions, including, presumably, whether or not to get vaccinated. Even if someone who goes through all this decides not to get vaccinated, it does not follow even probabilistically that they will die.

This is not an unusual line of thinking, however. A similar perspective leads most auto commercials these days to have written in fine print on the bottom of the TV screen the words “Trained driver on a closed course. Do not try this yourself.” Just seeing a driver put his Nisan Rogue into a four wheel drift on TV is like a drug, and viewers who are exposed to this commercial will thus be induced to drive to a spot where they can do the same, if they are not warned away from this.

What seems odd about this to me, even on its own terms, is the belief that people are not clever enough to realize that putting their Rogue into a high-risk manoeuvre might get them hurt, but that they are clever enough to pay attention to the warning in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen not to do that. What fundamentally lies underneath this is a view that people will do foolish things unless they are instructed appropriately – by, you know, us smart folks. Or Neil Young. [I am also well aware that this is to some extent driven by lawyers, trying to prevent their employers from getting sued successfully.]

The attitude is that people who roll their Nissan Rogue over doing four-wheel drifts and get injured or die have been inescapably driven to do that by seeing a commercial, just as people who listen to Rogan’s podcasts are driven to not get vaccinated and thus will die.

It’s a very 21st century perspective on human behavior, and I have no use for it. People have, and deserve to be given, agency. They gotta decide how to live their lives, and if they decide to go out and roll their Rogue over, that’s on them.

Here’s a different thing Young could have done. He could have mounted an info campaign to counter the ‘fake information’ that he felt Rogan was disseminating, in an effort to keep people from being swayed by it. His quote suggests he is quite confident that said information is ‘fake’ so he is presumably in a good position to explain to listeners what is fake about it, and, as the WSJ article says, he had 2.4 million followers on Spotify in ’22 before he left. That’s a decent audience. Of course, Young might well think his followers were not the audience that needed to have Rogan’s info countered, but as a famous rocker with plenty of resources (i.e., wealth), Young could surely have come up with many other ways of reaching people. Hell, tell Rogan you want to come on his podcast and have it out with him and his dangerous views. I suspect Rogan would have jumped at that opportunity if Young had offered it.

So, if it was true that Young was hoping to get Spotify to drop Rogan, then my point is that seems childish to me. Stand up and confront the guy if he’s so dangerous. That’s a response to perceived misinformation I could support.

That all being said, I don’t really believe that was Young’s motivation. According to the WSJ article

“Rogan’s show has been Spotify’s most listened to podcast for the last four years, according to the company.”

Young’s no fool, he didn’t expect to get Rogan’s podcast terminated, but if not that, what? What was Young trying to do?

People in the 21st century often talk of ‘taking a stand’, which I take to mean stating in public that they find something odious…or admirable, as the case may be. An overwhelming example of this can be found in all the demonstrations going on regularly around Canada about the Israel-Hamas war. The people who are engaged in these on both sides do not, I hope, think for a minute that their shouting and carrying signs around in Canada will have any impact on the decisions being made by the leaders of Hamas or Israel. And, if they think they can influence the government of Canada to change its position on the conflict in some way, then I again hope they don’t think any change in Canada’s official position on the war will influence anyone in Gaza or Tel-Aviv.

But, they clearly think it important to ‘make their voices heard’, to ‘call out____’ or ‘show their support/outrage’. Such declarations are another 21st-century fixation, one I suspect is facilitated by the existence in wealthy societies like those of Canada and the US of too many people with too much time on their hands. I mean, do the people in the UWO campground really believe they have moved forward some good cause by chanting in the face of a class of Ivy grads? Really? People like that could do some actual good in the world. London is chock full of people who are struggling, with poverty, addiction, poor health. If any of those campers were to sign up to work for Meals on Wheels, or volunteer to drive seniors who live alone to their medical and other appointments, they would make the world – locally – a better place in a clear and concrete way. But no, they find it a more valuable use of their time and energy to camp out and chant slogans about something that is happening thousands of miles away.

Coming back to Young, whichever of these two motivations might have lay behind Young’s 2022 move, neither seems one an adult should follow. If he thought to shut Joe up, I find that an admission of contempt for one’s fellow humans’ thinking. If you think Joe is full of shit, do something to convince folks of that. If, on the other hand Young just wanted to ‘call out Joe (or Spotify)’, to say ‘That is wrong’, then ok, I guess. It’s your time and energy (and money) to use as you like, Neil, but I can in turn think of no reason to change what I think about anything because you did that. As I said in my first post on this, the fact that Young took a financial and artistic hit to make that statement does convince me that he is sincere about it. And so what? Many people have sincere beliefs about many things.

Boycotting Loblaw’s

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Popular attitudes. No Comments on Boycotting Loblaw’s

A friend of mine mentioned in an email that there was a boycott of Loblaw’s going on. News to me, but hey, there’s that internet thing, so I started searching, and sure enough, there is. A Reddit group called r/loblawsisoutofcontrol is pushing a boycott of all Loblaw’s owned retail outlets in May.

Here’s the statement on the Reddit site:

“Our community has taken the time to organize a movement which aims to boycott Loblaw stores until prices can be reduced.

Since it’s founding, our community has seen hundreds of ridiculously priced goods, dumb deals, rotten produce and more. Loblaw, and other major grocers in Canada enjoy the benefits of a monopoly on an essential service, and force us to pay utterly ridiculous prices. Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis, and grocers are a major contributor to this. Vunerable populations such as seniors, persons with disabilities, and those on fixed incomes are left further behind. Food banks across the country are seeing a drastic increase in demand.

In response, our team has organized a boycott of Loblaw stores and demand action in order to provide relief to Canadians.”

The first thing I wondered about this was – why Loblaw’s, and not, say Metro or Sobey’s? If the group believes that prices are generally higher at Loblaw’s outlets than at those other places, then a campaign to buy from the other places rather than Loblaw’s is what used to be called ‘shopping’. Buy low is a good strategy, I reckon, not a movement in need of a reddit group.

On the other hand, the statement also says “Loblaw, and other major grocers in Canada enjoy the benefits of a monopoly on an essential service, and force us to pay utterly ridiculous prices.”

If there is more than one grocer, then nobody has a monopoly on anything, but it is true that the grocery industry in Canada is pretty concentrated, by which I mean that a few corporations sell most of the goods.

Below, courtesy of CBC, is a look at how revenues in the grocery industry in Canada are distributed. What that graphic doesn’t make clear is whether the Loblaw’s share of 29%, the largest, included sales of all the outlets the company owns. That is, are grocery sales from Shoppers and The Real Canadian Superstore, etc, included in the Loblaws number, or are those sales in the Other category.

Anyway, even if the ‘other’ category really is other, it seems that Loblaw’s, Metro, Costco and Sobey’s are the four big guns, and an industry in which the four largest sellers earn 72% of all sales revenue is pretty damn concentrated. An oligopoly, for sure. This is, btw, a problem in many industries in Canada, and one that has been commented on constantly by smarter people than me. Banking, airlines and other industries are also highly concentrated in Canada, and more importantly, perhaps, they have been becoming more so in the last decade or so. This trend toward higher concentration extends to our neighbours to the south, also.

Economists say many complicated things about competition, but on the ground it is about choices. If you, as a consumer, have a lot of choices as to where to buy something, that market is competitive, and so the more concentrated is an industry, the less competitive it is, on that measure. By the same measure, it was surely a mistake for the Canadian Competition Bureau to let Loblaw’s buy up most of Shopper’s Drug Mart back in the day, and more recently for Sobey’s to be allowed to buy Farmboy, just as it was a mistake to let ScotiaBank buy up Ing bank and turn it into Tangerine.

Of course, the grocery business could be worse: there isn’t actually a monopoly seller.  If Loblaw’s were that, no boycott would be possible and a monopoly Loblaw’s really would have control of an essential service.

There is also no doubt that grocery prices have risen faster than prices in many sectors in the recent inflationary period – that you can look up. One explanation for this could be as follows. We got inflation in Canada (as in the US and other countries) from 2022 forward in part because the Government threw piles of money at people during the pandemic, but there wasn’t a lot to spend it on during lockdowns. Once those were lifted, folks had lots of savings they wanted to spend, and firms’ attempts to meet this increased demand were somewhat stymied by supply-chain difficulties. So, you get good-old demand-pull inflation. The supply chain issues by now are mostly gone, but it is still true that increasing the supply of food in response to increasing demand can’t happen fast: crops, produce and cattle don’t come to market in a day, so there are still demand-pull issues in groceries. So, grocery prices are still rising faster than other prices.

I wouldn’t stake a million bucks on that explanation, but it’s not implausible, either.

Which returns me to the Loblaw’s boycott and my original question: why them? Is it a fact that prices have gone up more at Loblaw’s than at Sobey’s or Metro? If so, then we are back to ‘shopping’ and I’m not going to argue against shopping for lower prices. But if not, if prices have risen over the last two years about the same amount at all the major grocery stores, then I will hypothesize that Loblaw’s is the target largely because Galen Weston is so much in the news. Galen maybe needs to keep a lower profile.

A final note. Crack economist Jagmeet Singh was quoted recently in The National Post as follows: “We know the major driver that is driving up the cost of living is corporate greed….” (ellipsis in the original NP article).

Based on Singh’s deeply insightful analysis, reducing inflation in Canada shold not be hard. Just replace all our corporation heads with the ones that were on the job before 2022, as those folks were clearly not greedy – inflation in all sectors was microscopic back in those good-old days.

Don’t you love simple answers?

 

Attitudes on Peace, Order and Citizens’ Rights

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Attitudes on Peace, Order and Citizens’ Rights

At this point I have lived 63% of my life in Canada (nearly 81% of my adult life), but I was born in the US of A. It is common among my friends – wherever they were born – to argue about the differences, or lack thereof, between Americans and Canadians. Like all general comparisons, they are at best approximations, and not very precise ones, at that. Still, it’s a generally amusing exercise, and it gives us all something to argue about over beer.

However, sometimes things pop up on my radar that seem like they might reveal something useful about such differences. One example appeared in a letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail just after the Federal court ruling that the Liberal Government of the time was not justified in invoking the Emergencies Act during the trucker convoy protest in Ottawa. It’s hardly surprising that this decision prompted a lot of folks to write to the G&M, but the letter below caught my attention –

Letter to the Editor, G&M print edition, Jan 25, 2024

Re: “Invoking Emergencies Act wasn’t justified and infringed on Charter rights, Federal Court rules” (Jan 24).

Really? What is wrong with this country?

We watched as a collection of bullies occupied Ottawa, breaking parking and noise bylaws and generally being inconsiderate to the local inhabitants. The federal government is now being censured for its decision, which solved the problem with no blood spilled.

We as polite Canadians seem to be at the mercy of individuals who claim that their right to cause mayhem trumps our right to peace, order and good government.

Signed, etc.

—

I immediately wrote a (sarcastic, I admit) reply to this letter and sent it to the G&M Editors, which of course they did not print. I mean, really – the three sins of the protesters you can name are breaking parking and noise by-laws and being inconsiderate, and that to you is sufficient grounds for the government to invoke the Emergencies Act and start demanding banks turn over account information? Really?

I suspect if you asked 100 Canadians and 100 Americans whether they agreed with the letter-writer’s position, you would get a higher percentage agreeing among the Canadians than among Americans, but I’m not confident that the difference would be all that large. My suspicion is that 21st-century citizens of all the advanced democracies are on average more concerned with peace and order than with any threat to their rights as citizens. That is, to be sure, no more than a hunch, based on being on the planet a long time. If anyone knows of good research on Can-Am differences in attitudes about such matters, I would love to get references.

Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on Young, Rogan and the Cost of Principles

Came across an article in the Wall Street Journal last month headlined as:

Neil Young Will Return to Spotify After Two-Year Boycott Over Joe Rogan

Singer-songwriter says he had no choice but to return to streaming platform due to wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast

March 13, 2024 Gareth Vipers

For you non-WSJ subscribers who may have forgotten what this is all about, here’s a quote from the WSJ piece:

Young penned an open letter to his manager and label in 2022 asking them to remove his music from the platform, saying it was spreading fake information about Covid-19 vaccines through Rogan’s show.

The article explains that in fact, “…Young’s label legally has control over how and where his music is distributed…” but Vipers claims that they had reason to honor his request. The piece does not say if they actually did, and if they did not, then this would seem to have been a rather empty gesture on ol’ Neil’s part.

Anyway, the point of this piece was that Rogan had since 2022 made a very lucrative deal to have his podcast more widely streamed, including on Apple and Amazon, and in light of that, Young was going to start letting his musical recordings be distributed on Spotify again. [I am inferring from that piece of info that Warner Bros did indeed pull his stuff from Spotify in ’22.]

I am a fan of Young’s music. Hearing Cinnamon Girl blasting out of a pair of car speakers was one of the great thrills of my youth, and one of the few truly wonderful musical moments on the old Saturday Night Live show was when Young and Crazy Horse brought down the house with a searing version of Rockin’ in The Free World. The man was a serious rocker, and he wrote some great songs.

One of my favourite Neil Young moments was in 1988, when he put out an album titled This Note’s for You. It was a blast at other musicians who allow their music to be used to sell shit. One of my (admittedly costless to hold) convictions is that musicians (or actors or other performers) who have made serious money in their career and then allow their output or their selves to be used to sell shit – any shit – are putzes who I wouldn’t trust if I ever ran into them.

As one example, I was depressed a couple of years ago to hear the Who’s Eminence Front – one of their best recordings – being used to sell Nissans. From the movies we have Samuel L Jackson, Danny DeVito, Rob Lowe, Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and on and on….one sees them more often in ads than in movies.

[I would like to think there is a special place in hell for celebs who accept money to promote online gambling sites – Gretzky, McDavid, Matthews, Jamie Foxx, etc. But I’m sure there’s not.]

These people are not needy. I’m an economist, I get it, no one thinks they have enough money, but I happen to think there ought to be some things one will not do for more. And no, I am not saying that celebrities or people with more wealth than some specified number should be prohibited from selling other people’s shit. They all have a perfect right to do what they are doing. I’m really only saying I think less of them for doing it –  which troubles them not the least, I know.

So back to ol’ Neil. His original move to pull his music from Spotify had two characteristics. One, it harmed Spotify – maybe. Spotify operates a subscription model in which folks pay a monthly fee for the right to listen to music from its catalog, including Young’s. So, it would appear that Young’s move hurt Spotify only to the extent to which people cancelled their Spotify plans, either out of sympathy with Young, or simply because they would no longer be able to listen to his tunes on the platform. I don’t know if that happened (though I rather doubt it), but more important to me is the second characteristic, which is that Young paid a price himself for doing that. He lost his share of that revenue, too, and about that there is no doubt. To me, that speaks to a level of integrity in Young. I don’t mean to say I agree with Young’s apparent position that Rogan is evil. I’ve never listened to one of Rogan’s podcasts, and don’t know what was said on them that upset Young. My point is only that incurring a cost yourself over a principle signals integrity. Anyone can run around bashing others, imposing costs on others, people can do that just for amusement. Taking a hit yourself says something, it says you mean it. Similarly, Young’s apparent past refusal to let his music be used to sell shit cost him real $. Someone would surely have paid him to use his music to sell cinnamon or something, back in the day.

Of course, the corollary to all this is that Neil could have reacted to the recent news of the now-wider distribution of Rogan’s podcast by asking Warner Bros to pull his music from Amazon and Apple, too. That would be even more costly to Young, and would leave me even more impressed with his integrity and commitment. What he has actually done by, according to the article, allowing his music back on Spotify (along with leaving it on the other platforms) says to this observer that Young was not willing to pay that high a price for his principles.

And, to be clear, in ‘price’ I am not pointing only to the money he would lose from streaming payments. He’s a musician, composer and performer, and having people hear his music has been his life’s work. Losing that is a serious price to pay, even were no cash involved.

I judge Neil Young not, and I still thank him for putting out the This Note’s for You album and writing and recording Cinnamon Girl. I merely point out that everything has a price, and we all have to decide which prices we will pay and which we will not, and I continue to believe that those who pay a price to adhere to a principle deserve my respect, if not necessarily my agreement. And – those who have made millions, become famous and then go on to accept money to sell other people’s shit deserve my contempt.

Btw, if I’m right that Young’s original move in 2022 cost Spotify nothing, it raises another question: what was ol ‘Neil trying to accomplish? Topic for another post, perhaps.