calling it 'crap' is quite a different thing from saying it is 'affordable' and 'a good value', even if both imply the same thing w/r/t cost:quality vs absolute quality in that product family - one will get you bad press and social stigma, the other will win you fans. it's all about presentation.
The connotation is a lot different even if the reality can converge. A mass market pen I pickup in an office supply store can probably be reasonably described as affordable and good value. It's not as nice as one of the good pens I keep at home but I don't think it's fair to describe as "crap" in most contexts.
Sure, but the statement doesn't change the material aspects of the goods. If it was true then they were crap before, if it was not then they remain in the affordable category afterwards.
Then again, jewelry is to a large extent about perception and not their material properties.
You can't offend anybody more than by telling them a truth they don't want to hear.
If you insult someone with something that is clearly not true, they will brush it off.
But tell the truth they don't like and you will be hated more than anyone.
This is coming from someone who was frequently hated for saying the truth, because I come from a different culture and hadn't figured out how to navigate human interactions in the west. Especially when it comes to points that are related to people's identity formation (jewelry being a part of that)
Or as a favorite song says:
When the truth walks away
Everybody stays
Cause the truth about the world is that crime does pay
I guess the working class buyers knew they were buying cheap stuff. They just don't want to be humiliated or joked for doing so.
Often people buying these women's jewelry are men. A lot of women care more for their men who take time out and care to buy anything for mush more than the price itself.
Someone speaks the truth for once, and they call it "the effect". Reminds an episode it the Water World, where everyone says to Deacon how good his artificial eye looks (they are too scared of him), and only one kid says "it looks like sh*t".
I don't get it. So he made these jokes infront of shareholders just for kicks? Why would someone even say this infront of anyone, I don't understand. I am starting to think he might have been under the influence.
Shareholders and customers are basically on the opposite sides of a trade. All public companies have this problem to some degree: they want to tell their shareholders "we figured out how to offload stuff that we buy cheap onto unsuspecting customers, thereby making more profit for you". Meanwhile they want to tell their customers "look how wonderful and high quality our products are". These days this problem is solved with code-speak that wall st people understand but which sounds relatively benign and boring to cuswif they happen to see it e.g. "margin expansion through input cost reduction".
It is a delicate balance between open conversations (that allow to build and maintain a clear internal mental model) vs propaganda (in order to improve public perception).
Gerald Ratner made a wrong tradeoff in one case [too much openness and honesty for the audience that does NOT appreciate openness and honesty enough].
Some people are sadists who like to mock other people, in this case the customers. Ratners customers were mostly poorish people who wanted to dress up a bit or purchase gifts for someone they cared about. Dismissing the (relatively minor) luxury good as cheap crap mocked the intentions and emotions of the people buying it.
He didn't really "do" anything, he just spoke honestly. That's what he actually genuinely believed and how he and his company operated. The shock and awe is from the curtain being pulled back and the seedy underbelly of sales, marketing, and capitalism being exposed.
Ratner just got complacent and forgot he was on a hot mic.
Interesting that much of what sunk Osborune was actually a sunk cost fallacy from the $150K of assembled Osbourne 1 boards... if they had been sold off to a liquidator or hobbiests, they might've still turned a profit on em in the end.
At the very least they could've scrapped the boards and taken the tax writeoff.
Companies like Osborne and many others in the early-80’s microcomputer game were built by engineers who had taken a second mortgage. So when the cash ran out, there weren’t second chances via creative finance. Many ended up going back to their old high-paying jobs to pay down their debt and keep the house.
Sounds like more of a Sega-CD vs Playstation type failure than just his words. He probably felt he needed to talk about the next gen Osbourne 2 to really compete since he was trumped by competition.
Of course, everyone who bought it already knew it was crap. It's the same thing for buying $15K engagement rings. Everyone knows it's a stupid use of money and that the rings have no value. Same goes for clothing, cars, and many other things.
These types of products succeed because of a shared delusion. Take fashion for instance. Everyone believes some clothes are more fashionable than others. The way you dress says a lot about you but why? It's simply because other people think it does. If the delusion runs into reality from the person hawking it, it can collapse quite quickly.
That's a far leap from engagement ring cost being the result of society sharing a delusion and believing there is a delusion with some clothes being more fashionable than others.
Psychology has a definition named the halo effect and it's very real. A person definitely gains advantages in society when they appear more attractive than less attractive. Naturally people associate good health with attractiveness and it's hard wired in us for finding a healthy mate compared to an unhealthy mate. Good choice of clothing for the frame of a person can enhance personal features and make a person look better than if wearing something less fitting. So there is some benefit & gain that can be made with understanding fashion of clothes as a real benefit. Is the advantage based on a delusion of a person being more healthy than another? Sure, but it isn't because people intentionally have a delusion about one shirt looking better than another.
If that were the whole story then fashion would never change. The idea that your clothes should be the right size doesn't have much to do with the weird color cycling that clothing companies try to foist on people.
I absolutely agree with some clothing is used for health/sexual/wealth signaling and it works to some degree. But these simple ideas don't nearly explain fashion. If fashion didn't include a huge amount of delusion, it would converge. It wouldn't shift with each generation.
We are more than hardwired to find the most capable mate. We're also hardwired to pick up social cues so if a large enough group of people believe something, we believe it too. If everyone you knew started wearing those MC Hammer pants tomorrow, how long would you hold out? If people suddenly and entirely stopped wearing ties with suits, would continue to wear the most unnecessary accessory ever? Why does everyone in tech dress so similarly?
Well, isn't it a similar process to ring prices? Everybody thinks spending few month of your life to finance some brown people exploitation is a way to show commitment and other desirable qualities for a mate, so doing so is advantageous.
It's not (necessarily) a delusion though, because it is something rational non-deluded people would do. For example, to use a really simple toy example, if you're a man then buying an expensive ring for a women is a credible signal of commitment. Why? Because you can't fake the sacrifice of 6 months of sacrificed work in order to buy a ring for her.
If you're a man who wants a wife, this is a clear level headed choice to make. I think delusion as a term should not include optimal choices made by individual actors.
It's a rational move in a crazy delusional game created by the marketing department of a diamond company about 100 years ago. By doing such, you are simply perpetuating the delusion.
Sometimes it makes rational, logical sense to play the game. It's a form of intentional stupidity. Forgoing your rationality to get the things you want. If you ever worked at a large enough company, I'm sure you understand.
If I know it's crap, and you know it's crap, but I don't know that you know it's crap, I may think that it still works as a social signal. Once it becomes common knowledge, the jig is up.
There's a difference between both you and the recipient sorta knowing it's cheaper/cheap jewelry but, heh, people like us can't really afford the posh stuff. It's the thought that counts and all that. And the company's CEO describing it as "crap."
Cheap status symbols are a bit of a paradox. They are purchased with the intent of being indistinguishable from luxury status symbol at a distance, even though the quality of the item is what gives it status. There is an entire industry of forgery and a culture of shaming because of this.
Many commenters in this thread seem not to have imagined that people get pleasure from owning and using attractive things. I mean, hardly anything has the same appeal to everyone, but most luxury items that are aimed at the middle and upper middle class have more resources spent on making them attractive to look at and use. It's not as though being a "status symbol" was just an arbitrary thing unrelated to that. Conformity and symbolism are part of the value, but only one part.
Something that was good enough to invest a little of their hopes and dreams in. You are applying a sophisticated buyer's perspective to the situation of a fairly naive person; some customers would certainly recognize the sales strategy for what it was, but many younger or less well off customers would take the retailer's claims at face value at least for a while.
Sure, nobody might expect much of a pair of earrings bought to wear at a party for a couple of pounds, but you'd be upset if you bought an engagement ring and the stone fell out.
This is really applicable to any products that are valued based on their marketing efforts instead of intrinsic value or utility. Costume jewellery, designer clothes, some kinds of art, all derive their value from the story the creators tell. The most expensive art seems to be that which has the most thoroughly verified, or at least the most believable story.
I like to think I’d prefer Apple products over the competition and pay a premium for them even if I didn’t know Jobs or Ive, or watched the marketing videos - but I’m not entirely sure these days. I Tim Cook said Apple products were super cheap to produce, or Ive said he didn’t design any of them and had some intern do it, would sales tank?
Apple stuff is just so clearly beyond anything the competition provides with regards to software, though. I don’t really buy them for the hardware, I buy them because I don’t like Windows or Android, and I don’t want to futz with Linux. Android is still too inconsistent design-wise.
I buy Apple products in spite of Cook and Ive. I am mostly ambivalent about Cook, though I don't think he's nearly as strong a leader as Jobs was. And I really dislike Ive. If he disavowed his designs as coming from an intern, I'd feel relieved.
Price, value and practical utility are not really correlated.
A Rolex and a Timex will both tell you the time. An iPhone and a $129 Android will do mostly similar things. A Toyota Camry and a Porsche will both get you to work.
But practical utility and value aren't necessarily the most important thing.
Apple intuitively understood this, at a time when other computer companies didn't. Lots of people look at a Macbook and see an overpriced computer that costs a few hundred dollars more than a similarly equipped PC, albeit in a pretty case. But that's the point - lots of people want their computer to look good!
Apple products are relatively cheap to produce - and they make an enormous margin on their hardware. But it doesn't feel cheap. The boxes are substantial. The finishings are high quality. The user experience is taken care of. Other PC makers might have been much cheaper, but you notice that to do so, they've cut corners in places.
I don't think the lesson here is in what he said, but rather that he made his customers feel like idiots. Only a fool would believe that a ring for £1 has the level of quality and craftsmanship that you'd get with a £100 ring, but you don't want to feel like a dumbass for buying it. You don't go to McDonalds with expectations of buying a Michelin Star meal. You go there for something warm & tasty, that comes out quickly.
>A Toyota Camry and a Porsche will both get you to work.
That's not the practical utility people want out of a Porsche. They want the practical utility of impressing people (including the other sex), appearing well off and sporty, etc.
Those are also practical considerations - just not the first that come to mind when one thinks of cars (although not very far).
(Practical as in: not aesthetic but with real life impact on real life goals).
>Apple products are relatively cheap to produce
So they say, but e.g. other manufacturers tried for the first 2-3 years years to get a tablet with the specs of the iPad, and still couldn't get theirs at a lower price...
Or how if you add the same SSD/video/memory/CPU/etc options to a PC laptop, you get close to the same prices. I know cause I've tried to build an equivalent Lenovo (and a few other brands) and it gets so close I might as well just get the MBP.
> They want the practical utility of impressing people (including the other sex)
And it's not gonna do that if the CEO shits on his own product. Things that are good because they are good are less vulnerable than things whose value comes from being impressive because of marketing.
>Lots of people look at a Macbook and see an overpriced computer that costs a few hundred dollars more than a similarly equipped PC, albeit in a pretty case.
I was shopping for a dev laptop about a year or two ago, and it was more like double the price rather than just a few hundred dollars more.
Definitely. A new MacBook pro with 16GB RAM, a decently speedy 512 GB SSD, the basic display, dedicated graphics, and an 2.3 GHz 8 core i9 costs $2.8K [0].
An XPS 15 with 32GB RAM, a decently speedy 1TB SSD, the basic display, dedicated graphics, and a 5.0 GHz 8 core i9 costs like $2.3K [1].
I couldn't customize the XPS enough to do a direct comparison. But the XPS 15 with the almost the same specs as the MacBook other than having an i7 was about 1.6K.
I feel the argument but I think I would need different examples to better understand.
There are reasons for owning a watch other than "tell the time," which could include "tell the time accurately without ever needing to change batteries," or "tell the time and date," or "tell the time while scuba diving."
Rolex may be overkill but different watches serve different roles, and it's not just brand name alone that makes Rolex cost orders of magnitude more - in many ways, it really is just that much better of a product. Same for Camry vs Porsche.
An Apple product, particularly a Macbook, on the other hand, not so much. It's a nice aluminum chassis over crappy, cheap internals that break so often people throw around words like "class action" to describe the keyboards. It's like cramming a knock-off Timex movement into a Rolex case.
> Rolex may be overkill but different watches serve different roles
A Casio is going to tell the time better than a Rolex. Quartz watches are much more precise, and they’re powered by batteries, so last much longer without any maintenance. Rolex is simply in the segment of high quality, hand made mechanical watches. A segment people like for reasons other than its precision in keeping time.
> A Rolex and a Timex will both tell you the time. An iPhone and a $129 Android will do mostly similar things. A Toyota Camry and a Porsche will both get you to work.
If your priorities are telling time, having a smartphone, and commuting to work, I agree with you. But I think the more expensive products you mention offer things the cheaper products don't.
For example, I'd rather have a Camry if I needed a family car with a reasonable total cost of ownership. I'd want a Porsche if I wanted a fast & sporty car.
I think stronger examples would be comparing cheap & quality products that both cater to the same market segment. For example, making a cheap car that cuts corners on expensive parts like emissions controls, safety equipment, and stitching in the seats, but making it look & feel like a Camry. Eventually that a line of cheap cars will develop a reputation for being an overpriced junky deathtraps, and no amount of marketing will hide that.
Alternatively, you can make a Camry with the same quality and cover it with glitzy trim, market it as a luxury car, and sell it at a premium...which we call a Lexus.
My takeaway is that between two similar products, once people discover what is really going on, will they feel misled? And can people become informed in the first place?
In the case of Lexus vs Gotta, I'd guess informed consumers won't feel mislead. In the case of quality Camry vs a junky FauxCamry, it's more about being marketing in the FauxCamry that deceptively over promises is on a car that under delivers.
I think I've stretched this analysis about as much as I can.
The Lexus LS400 debuted in 1989 with a very high tech v8, with the highest r&d budget of any car engine to date. The 1uz-fe was an outstanding engine however you look at it, and so were its derivatives made well into the 00s. Other auto makers including euro brands like BMW had to play catch up. Lexii weren't just glitzed up cheap cars, nor necessarily high margin. There were some models like that, though. The Lexus GS300 was a Camry, if I remember right. And Scion TCs are Toyota Corollas.
The ES is/was the FWD platform that is said to be related to the Camry. Although I seem to remember that these days the ES is more related to the Avalon, a larger, but also FWD car. The GS is a different, RWD platform.
Also, in many cases, Japanese luxury models under their own nameplate were sold under the parent company name overseas, like in Japan. For instance, the original Acura NSX was the Honda NSX elsewhere.
Rolex is an interesting example, because their value is actually based on utility, not style. People actually (used to) wear them a mile under the sea, measure oxygen with them while diving etc. You can’t trust a Timex with your life, but a Rolex you can. That establishes baseline value, like a finely crafted Japanese chef knife. My dinner won’t taste any better, but the tool I’m holding is valuable to the people who know their stuff.
I have never seen or heard of someone using a Rolex for diving. As you said, maybe they used to. And that’s the point-they used to, so now that value that was utility is now purely style.
Except, of course, that while a Toyota has an excellent reputation for reliability, a Porsche not so much. So the latter may not get you to work at all.
But you'll look damn good sitting at the side of the road...
The value of the well-told story applies equally well to products that do have intrinsic utility. Look at how we developers choose the software we use.
People making these decisions often claim their choices are made on purely rational grounds. But why then do large companies choose to spend so much money marketing things like Kubernetes, React, MongoDB, Red Hat Linux, etc? Surely these high-quality projects would stand their own in a marketplace of open code even without the money...
Some software companies like Oracle tell their stories primarily to corporate buyers, and developers sneer at them, thinking they're too smart to fall for that. Other companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have learned to tell their stories in ways that leave developers oblivious that they're being marketed to.
The story that the OP is referring to is not the story (if any) portrayed by the art, but the story of the work itself. So it is bound up in the story of the artist, the history of a particular work, and the path from the artist's conception to the the most current owner. You might call that provenance, but it's a wider net than just that.
You also buy Apple products for the software, not only for the hardware.
Comparing a windows laptop with highier specs with a macbook is like to compare a stupid blonde with big tits with a smart, classy and well tempered brunette. The cover is flashier and catch the attention on first sight but it's a burden to live with on a daily basis.
> Costume jewellery, designer clothes, some kinds of art, all derive their value from the story the creators tell.
As a young lady my GF used to sell her handmade costume Jewelry on the street in New York. She said the key to selling was a card with a story. That was the difference between selling a brooch made of glass, brass and random bits held together with glue for $10-20 and not selling at all.
Things are different with utility items. I remember a retailer (my brain won't cough up the name, but every man over 40 would recognize them). He said his brand was, well made spiffy but not too spiffy men's clothes. His profit margin depended an a working age man being able to go in, buy a couple of shirts, pants, and a coat knowing he wouldn't look like a dork when he wore them to work.
I don't buy Apple products for its story. I buy Apple products because I don't have to spend time doing tech support/dealing with malware for my parents and if something breaks I can go get a replacement at the Apple store immediately.
What I don't understand, is how it wasn't immediately apparent this stuff was junk? You couldn't possibly think that it was equal in quality to much more expensive competitors. I guess it's just the case of not being real, until someone says it.
Diamonds, especially the recent craze around discolored ones might be a good comparison. They are valuable mostly because of years of shrewd marketing. If DeBeers started telling the truth, they could drop in value pretty quickly.
I was absolutely floored when I started seeing advertisements for 'chocolate' diamonds a few years back, and even more floored that people I knew just HAD to have them.
I had dealt with 'chocolate' diamonds for years, I currently have hundreds in my wood shop! My father works as a machinist, and brown, low-quality diamonds are their abrasive of choice for many jobs. They're (or rather, they were) super cheap because they were such low quality. I always swiped a handful when I visited him at work as a kid, because they made great pellets (they were exceptionally tiny and really hard) for my slingshot. I had a whole jug of them and just forgot about the things.
At least jeans manufacturers weren't marketing based on the unblemished workmanship of their jeans. Their typical message is "Jeans are worn by rugged, individualist people. You want to be a rugged independent person, right?" And I think that torn jeans can fit into that. Like, a farmer might rip his jeans and keep wearing them or something, so ripped jeans might make you look even more rugged and individualist.
Chocolate diamonds are a direct contradiction of regular diamond marketing. If you go to great lengths to talk about how important clarity is when justifying your diamonds' prices, it's particularly silly when you start selling the least clear diamonds possible.
Several years ago, my mom ran low on money, so she decided to sell her old wedding ring. She hadn't worn it for years because she and my dad got divorced long ago, so she figured she'd at least get some liquid cash by selling it.
The first shop she took it to offered a little under 10% of what it cost. She thought the shop was trying to scam her, so she went to a bunch of other shops, and they all offered less. So she went back to the first shop a couple of days later, and there was a different guy there who told her that the first guy was an idiot who overvalued the diamond. It was a piece of junk, and it was worth well under 10% of what it cost. The jeweler also pointed out, in detail, that the diamond itself was really shitty even by the standards of wedding rings. But because they already made that offer, they decided to honor it anyway just to avoid any drama. And so my mom sold a ring that cost her and my dad $30k for about $2600.
And I understand that's normal. Retailers mark new diamond rings up like crazy because that's how much people are willing to pay for a wedding ring, even if it's not what the stone is actually worth.
My understanding with such apparent truths is that even if its noticeable to an individual its a question of his personal opinion vs prevailing wisdom. so in his mind he runs a quick calculus on the cost of changing other peoples prevailing opinion and possibly alienating them of just giving in and buying the damn thing. Now when it is said out loud by somebody with enough critical weight then that calculation shifts dramatically & it may be worthwhile speaking up again. once that opinion is out there you can move that conclusion out into your model of the world instead of keeping it in your personal model so essentially you are unburdened from having to keep that mental context alive within you and you can more easily move on to the next step from there.
IMHO this is how diamonds have proliferated for so long despite having minimal intrinsic value.
As someone who couldn't tell a sherry decanter from a hole in the wall, I assume it is equal in quality to more expensive competitors; that is to say, more expensive competitors charge more for effectively the same products.
It's a glass bottle, it doesn't leak, it doesn't shatter when you pick it up. Apart from appearance, how much better quality could it usefully be?
Sure, but common sense comes in to play when the one you bought is valued at $1, and everywhere else is $1000. And if everyone knew and didn't care, then why blow it up as if it was some big secret?
I couldn't help but think of Trump and his superlatives. Lots of people joke when he says something is "the best" or "the greatest it's ever been". Trump does this quite a bit with respect to the economy and the markets.
The engineer in me takes things at face value: measured, empirical and framed in the right context. But I can understand the salesman approach to selling: you need to promote your product as the best.
This is especially true for the markets where valuations are pretty much "maxed out" and at all time highs. So the market runs on optimism and future expectations. The market will go up because I say it will go up! Nothing wrong with that perspective IMHO - insofar as talking about the markets.
What were the effects it had on the company? They just mention the stock tanking which, by itself, is pretty meaningless. I'm assuming people stopped buying the stuff?
Secondly, why did it have any effect? Who would change their practices because of this? It really rams home how deeply brands are integrated into our understanding of value.
That's way less of an exciting headline, though. The company is the only way to realize the value of a brand, and if the company is still doing fine today, it considerably weakens the lessons here: it's apparently not even that bad in the worst case scenario.
I think the more interesting lesson to learn from this was how Ratner was able to deal and cope with the public embarrassment following the mishap. It reminds me of this TED talk where Jon Ronson talks about how public shaming has gone out of control with the advent of social media: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_what_happens_when_onlin...
Actually, the best "public shaming" talk I've seen are the ones given by Monica Lewinsky. When you consider that Monica Lewinsky was 22 years old during the time of the scandal, a lot of the stuff going on was simply outside of her control.
Whenever there is a huge power mismatch in a relationship - that is generally not a situation where you can't say someone is not coerced in any way. Especially when the person in question is the president of the United States!
That’s why in most companies it’s absolutely verboten for a manager to have any kind of romantic/sexual relationship with subordinates. This should apply to the president too. Having sex with an intern is just shameful and shows serious character issues.
>These are the types of things most men don't have to worry about.
My co-worker went got me fired because I didn't accept her advances. It's a long story but she accused me of hitting on her, when in reality she was hitting on me and I was just ignoring her. A bunch of other guys supported her (idk why, I didn't know those guys much but they supported her even tho she is a pathological lier.)
Men are sexually attracted to women. Following your line of reasoning women should NOT use that sexual attraction to their advantage and should not have sexual relationships with men.
It's also generally not a situation where you can say someone was coerced in any way without knowing more details. They are two adults engaging in consensual activity. I seriously doubt she thought there would be negative consequences if she said no. More likely she thought she might stand to gain something if she went along with it, but that's hardly coercion.
I don't know, I have somewhat different thinking about sex in professional settings. I tend to see women as more capable of using their own judgement in those situations and less needing of protection. That's not always the case though, like with Harvey Weinstein.
Edit: comment if you disagree, downvotes won't change my opinion.
I think you'd have to be a 90s kid to really understand. It was the Lewinsky affair, or the Lewinsky scandal. Lewinsky's name was attached to the event more so than even Bill Clinton.
As such, it was Lewinsky's name who appeared in songs, raps, TV shows, movies, etc. etc. to describe the political drama at the time.
Lewinsky also had to describe her sexual acts to Congress, publicly aired across television networks nationwide, before the age of social media. Lewinsky basically got to experience the entire "social media outrage" machine before social media even existed. EDIT: Of course, Bill Clinton just lied about it, so there's the whole Lewinsky is just "trying to get attention" angle as well going on.
It was Lewinsky's word vs the President's. It was very much a a big political drama at the time, and Lewinsky drew the short-stick of the arrangement as the 22-year old intern. And again: the powers that be were the Republicans pushing to impeach the President, and Clinton who was lying to defend himself. Etc. etc. It was a very big scandal, but I don't think Lewinsky actually did anything wrong throughout it all. But her name was unfairly attached to the whole event.
Hmm, I just searched for the first song. I'm going to fully admit that I'm bad with music and don't listen to much. But 100% Lewinsky's name was used in a lot of stuff.
Not to dismiss the pressure she went through, but Bill Clinton got impeached over it and basically went incognito for many years due in no small part to both the scandal and impeachment.
It's not a victim olympics, but I don't think anyone can claim the repercussions for him were small or light.
Ha, in which direction was the power imbalance -- [old] men will risk their status and livelihood for a "pretty girl", and many a woman has used that to wield power over even the most politically powerful man.
Yep. It's not a stretch at all. In the military it's strictly forbidden and there are rules in place in case two people accidentally fall in love where there's a power imbalance.
Sex/romance with a subordinate in any organization is such a bad idea for so many reasons. Possibility of coercion is one, favoritism and dissent among other subordinates is another.
A direct report is definitely a bad idea, but what if it's someone who reports to one of your reports?
Or someone who report to another manager?
etc.
At some point it should become ok. Completely forbidding people to find romance at the workplace would make it feel so gray, especially given the time you sink in it.
You can debate if Lewinsky was a victim of Clinton but she absolutely was a victim of Linda Tripp, who had her own vendetta against the Clintons. Tripp manipulated her, secretly recorded their conversations, lied, betrayed her confidences, and served her up to the machinery that was working to take down Clinton.
I'm sorry to be pedantic, but I'm confused by what seemed to be a recommendation to read this link because it's going to be awesome, but then you say "incredible interviews." I'd feel a lot better if you clarified, before I read, "incredible" as in "extraordinary" or "difficult to believe."
I'm having trouble deciding whether or not you are being serious. Yes, technically, the word "incredible" originally meant "not credible." However, in common usage, it simply means, "very good."
Says who? Merriam-webster's first definition is "too extraordinary and improbable to be believed".
Cambridge: "impossible or very difficult to believe:"
Dictionary.com: "so extraordinary as to seem impossible:
incredible speed.
not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable:
The plot of the book is incredible."
Or is dictionary.com too incredible?
And, I know I'm risking hardcore my karma here, but I see "good" used as a moral measure. I doubt that "incredible" is referring to the interviewee's moral excellence, but I could imagine that perhaps the interviews are along the lines of becoming a better person.
Perhaps, I should have specified that it has come to mean good in this context. It probably started out as a short hand for something like "incredibly good" (as in, "it's hard to believe it's so good").
As long as we're quoting dictionary definitions (also from dictionary.com). We're using definition 2, here:
incredible
adjective
1. beyond belief or understanding; unbelievable
2. informal marvellous; amazing
Good is definitely a judgment, but there is no reason to suppose it is a moral one. If I say a sandwich is good, it means that I like the taste not that I think it is righteous in the eyes of God. Ironically, perhaps, if I thought the sandwich was especially delicious, I might say that it is righteous. The vast majority of native English speakers would immediately understand my intended meaning rather than the literal one.
I find it somewhat incredible that I have to explain this.
I don't see why you would suspect them of not being serious. Not everyone on this site is a native English speaker. I know when I was first learning English I'd get tripped up by things like awful and awesome, terrific and terrible, being the only one left after your friend has left, turning the alarm off after it goes off, and so on. Plenty of things in the English language that can look like the opposite of what they actually mean.
That's incredibly pedantic, and in any event even the dictionary gives extraordinary as a synonym. But I'd never before considered the derivation of incredible before, so I learned something today :) On the other hand, you've ruined me as I'll never be able to unsee in-credible. :(
She is a woman who spoke out about sexual harassment in the 90s. That’s how women got treated then. Take a look at the treatment Anita Hill and Paula Jones got sometime.
How was that sexual harassment. She had sex with Bill because she was attracted to him. It’s not sexual harassment just because a man with power has sex with a younger woman.
Sex, in a situation with a major power imbalance, is problematic. Also, do we know she had sex with him because she was attracted to him, and not because he pressured her into it?
The media played it as though she was reveling in her situation prior to the public exposure. Some of the public interactions she had with Clinton made it all the easier to sell that perspective to the public.
I think the issue is that she kept the clothing with the semen, which speaks about planning and cunning.
People talk about the power imbalance, but at the end of the day there are a lot of people who sleep with their superiors because they want to rather than being coerced (explicitly or implicitly). I don't think we'll ever truly know if she was coerced or not, but we know for sure that she kept that clothing.
And I think this is the tipping point for most people. Everyone understands that she may have been a victim in it.
That may be the reality, but I don't believe that was the narrative then, or common knowledge now. Certainly I wasn't aware of that, although I'm also not too particularly invested in it so don't follow things that closely.
It certainly was the narrative then. I was in college at the time and there were weeks where Linda Tripp was mentioned more than Monica.
I got the direct impression from the news that Monica Lewinsky was this pretty young thing, very innocent, who had a tryst with the POTUS and was freaking out. Linda Tripp came along and under a false veneer of sophistication and helpfulness, instructed Monica on what to do, move-by-move.
The story was of an ingenue who was, in turn, under the thrall of the POTUS and then Linda Tripp.
> You believe Lewinsky was a victim of what, exactly?
Being pressured into a sexual relationship by her superior, who was by many standards the most powerful person on the planet at the time?
Like, regardless of whether you believe that's true or not it's pretty obvious how people might arrive at the conclusion that she was a victim and why there's debate about it.
exactly. We know the opposite happens too, being attracted to powerful people. We'll never know the truth and claiming you do know one way or the other, or that one of those possibilities isn't possible is intellectually dishonest imo.
> Being pressured into a sexual relationship by her superior
That baseless assertion was excluded from the onset of the case, was never a realistic assumption, and since then this conspiracy theory was put to rest.
So, besides made-up nonsense, you believe Lewinsky was a victim of what exactly?
The political machine had an interest in smearing her. Democrats could never let her be seen as a victim, because if she's a victim Bill Clinton is a predator. Meanwhile, some of the right wing media-started mocking her as not what you'd expect the leader of the free world to get with, if for no better reason than it makes for better TV than lecturing about family values.
Our culture still (and even more so a couple of decades ago) has a strong undercurrent of hating sluts and loving studs. This is where men are expected and encouraged to “conquer” many women and women are expected to resist it.
The following is how it gets interpreted by a lot of people and has no connection whatsoever to my own opinions of these two people:
Clinton having an affair with an intern was seen as bad because of the infidelity, but at the same time it makes him look virile and manly. It’s a mixed bag but he comes out looking pretty good overall.
An intern having an affair with Clinton is bad because it makes her a slut and she should have resisted her carnal urges. And she had an affair with a married man, so she’s a home wrecker too! There’s no positive aspect to this at all, and it’s all her fault for not behaving. And then her misbehavior gets plastered all over the national news, and she gets the shaming she deserves!
I loved John Oliver on the Daily Show, but I find Last Week Tonight formulaic and dull. It's the identical shtick every week with a different topic to be outraged over.
Oliver leans towards "entertainment" than "information" in my experience. There's a time and place for entertainment, but I definitely need to double-check his facts before relying upon them.
Some of Oliver's arguments are "weak", feeling like he's sometimes padding for time. With that being said, Oliver is far better at this format than say... Bill Nye. (I was... saddened, by the weak treatment of subjects on that show)
Colbert seems to be focusing more on a typical late-night formula (talk with celebrities to promote books and movies, primarily on "safe" subjects: see his "Meanwhile" segments, which are hilarious but otherwise pallet cleansers). Colbert barely has much more than 5-minute talks on any political subject these days... a good thing for the mass-audience, but too short to really dive deeply into a subject matter outside of highlighting a few headlines.
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Overall, Oliver is one of the better shows in this category. But certainly has its flaws. No one really beats John Stewart, who really mastered the segment and earned my trust. (Stewart even had to do this in a far more difficult setting: once per night, 4 times a week. Oliver only has to prep for one segment per week). Stewart certainly had his mistakes, but he also humbled himself with constant reminders that Stewart was a "sad clown", reminding the audience that his skits were primarily driven for entertainment (even if large bits were educational)
The main difference between Oliver and Stewart is that Oliver seems to have fewer self-deprecating bits, or reminders that Oliver is primarily a sad clown as well. Entertainment outrage... relatively well researched, but still entertainment nonetheless.
Maybe I should watch Trevor Noah and see how he's keeping up the old Stewart timeslot.
> He's obviously too biased to have a fair view.
Stewart was biased, but overwhelmingly fair in my experience. Yeah, he leaned left, but no one can deny their own personal bias on political subjects, and that's fine IMO.
Oliver is biased, but IMO isn't as fair as Stewart in all subject matters. Fortunately, Oliver is "fair enough" and still has a decent show.
I was slow to warm up to John Oliver. Now I'm fascinated by "explainer journalism" and the void it fills.
It blows my mind that comedians now have the moral and factual authority, forfeited by the nominal news and pundit people.
Further, it again shows that anything taken to its logical extreme becomes the opposite. Roger Ailes (and others) had the keen insight of treating news as entertainment. John Oliver (and others) have taken that notion full circle, restoring the "inform the audience" role.
Everybody knew what they where buying. What they didn't appreciate was learning that the CEO of the company laughing at them behind their back for not being able to afford anything 'better'.
Imagine the difference in how you’d feel as a middle-class working guy buying from them. The CEO could say:
“We work hard to keep our prices low by carefully selecting affordable materials while still providing stylish, attractive and fashionable products our customers love.”
...or:
“Our products are crap, the materials in them are crap, and by virtue of buying them, our customers assert that all they want is crap.”
Producing low cost items is not the issue, and naturally the quality is less with low cost items. People understood they weren’t buying high-grade platinum. It’s the expressed sentiment of the company leader was the gaffe.
I think a lot of people, then and now, miss the important takeaway here. It's not about Ratner or his products; it's about all the other products that we continue to use and trust every day, because their creators are smart enough to maintain the lie.
Most people on HN just treat it as a cautionary tale, as the implicit lies that underlie most SV companies are piled high and deep. Everyone knows they are standing on a rug, and are anxiously looking around for any pulling.
Remind me of the recent case where a person (Google tells me that her name is Maria Butina) got busted as a Russian spy after she had a habit of bragging that she was a Russian spy when drunk.
And George Papadopoulos bragging, kicking off the investigation:
> During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Article mentions that they had to change their name to "The Signet Group" ... the now parent company of Zales/Kay/Jared. I'd be interested to learn more about that transition
Indeed, in the UK they own H Samuel and Ernest Jones - with exactly the same business model and value as Ratner’s. So you could argue it didn’t have much long term impact.
Well they closed hundreds of shops in the years immediately following, and already owned H Samuel back then. Not sure about E Jones, which is a little more upmarket anyway.
I would say this is not the Ratner effect but the Othello effect (as in Reversi not Shakespeare)
Ratner merely put down the last piece that flipped almost the whole board. Marketing is usually the uphill struggle to persuade anyone looking at the board that "white is winning" when it is really anyone's game.
But eventually one piece is played, often a public failure, and everyone realises the board was destined to be black anyway.
It's much harder to play this marketing game when you are selling costume jewellery or other fashion lead items. And the odds of someone flipping the board are high without you realising it.
That board didn't have to flip. Ratner could have just kept selling the brand instead of stating his true opinions to a media circus. And the brand would have retained its value, perhaps all the way to today if he could have kept the unit economics alive.
What made the brand successful wasn't what Ratner thought it was.
The word at hand here is 'hubris'. Successful people slowly lose touch with the rest of the world and eventually make a colossal screw-up.
The re-branded company he was forced out of is now the largest diamond retailer in the world- so I'd say that the problem was him and his mouth, not an inevitable flip in fortune.
It's also possible he wasn't a real problem, but when his remarks caused a temporary (big) problem for the company, other stakeholders saw the opportunity to take control.
There's probably a counterfactual universe where he remained in his position, he learned a valuable lesson on keeping his mouth shut in public, and the company re-branded and recovered on a similar trajectory.
Zuckerbergs infamous "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumbfucks" springs to mind. While I'm sure there is some amount of long term damage, you'd be hardpressed to say it has crippled Facebook.
The tired analogy is premised of that this was some "final piece".
It wasn't, the company was going from strength to strength.
And whether "eventually it would flip" is another thing, and is irrelevant to this argument. Sure, every company will go down at some point.
That doesn't validate the idea put forward that this was some kind of "final piece" and the company was ready to flip anyway. There's absolutely no evidence for that. Your argument presupposes what it should prove.
Having contempt for your customers is not a good long-term business strategy. Some people get away with it for a while, but eventually they get found out.
Money isn't a finite resource that "goes elsewhere" if you don't generate it through business activity. This is probably one of the biggest popular misconceptions of how business works, that there is only a limited amount of value to go around, instead of it just being a near unlimited balloon that can expand or contract.
I'm well aware that money moves all the time but giving it away removes the burden of making "good" and rational decision, especially if you have a lot of it.
Or Maybe you don't like hanging out with rich people, when you're very rich you can't hang out with poor people. You can but you have to probably lie about your wealth.
What I find most fascinating is that a multimillion dollar company was destroyed simply because the owner told the truth. Imagine if fast food CEOs were honest about the quality of their food instead of just parroting marketing bullshit.
Yeah, this is what I find is the most sad part. I actually value people who are willing to be transparent and honest about themselves, and in my mind that kind of honesty should increase the valuation of a company, at least in the sense that there is indirect value delivered to society when more honest people are in control of money.
I rarely eat at the big fast food chains--and it's usually because I have no other options. But what's the "truth" about the quality of the food?
The CEO could quite honestly say that their goals are consistency, speed, food safety, and affordability. Quality? I expect the honest response would be something along the lines of 1.) Millions of customers apparently like our product and 2.) We try to deliver the best quality product we can subject to our customers' other priorities. The CEO probably believes this to some degree or other. They're not trying to deliver a high-end steakhouse experience. McDonald's isn't even trying to deliver a Shake Shack experience--which maybe costs 2x (at least)?
I eat McDonalds rather frequently for lunch because there's one nearby, a double cheeseburger is $1.89, and has 26g of protein and under 500 calories. I think they taste fine; I wouldn't pay more for a better tasting one.
I'm pretty sure nearly every McDonalds customer thinks the same way. They want quick, cheap, safely prepared food that tastes good enough to eat.
I pretty much can't stand them personally--except for the fries and maybe a couple of breakfast items. But I readily admit I'm a bit of a foodie. I'm certainly not going to begrudge others who find them a good value or even, gasp, like them.
I would also identify as a foodie. But I don't always need a 12 course tasting menu, and sometimes a dollar cheeseburger with a mild and predictable taste is a good source of calories.
Fair enough. I just find McDonald's sort of ick. I'd rather (and am in a position to) spend a few bucks more to eat something I actually enjoy. And I'm happy to just skip an ick meal.
But that's not a value judgement. Just how I personally prefer to eat.
It's some of the poorest quality food you can get with a price to match, though that's highly dependent upon what you order and where you go.
It's complete garbage compared to what the CEO is eating, and while everybody knows that, the CEO will never state it publicly. The story about Ratner is a direct example of what would happen.
Anyone have data on the Ratner Group's shares prior to Feb '91? I'm sort of skeptical because the chart begins there. It could have been on a downward trend anyway.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadThen again, jewelry is to a large extent about perception and not their material properties.
If you insult someone with something that is clearly not true, they will brush it off.
But tell the truth they don't like and you will be hated more than anyone.
This is coming from someone who was frequently hated for saying the truth, because I come from a different culture and hadn't figured out how to navigate human interactions in the west. Especially when it comes to points that are related to people's identity formation (jewelry being a part of that)
Or as a favorite song says:
When the truth walks away
Everybody stays
Cause the truth about the world is that crime does pay
Often people buying these women's jewelry are men. A lot of women care more for their men who take time out and care to buy anything for mush more than the price itself.
Why humiliate them this way?
This is the most interesting question, which the article doesn't answer.
Presumably he just didn't consider the possibility that the press would think it worth making a story out of.
Some people are just like that.
Gerald Ratner made a wrong tradeoff in one case [too much openness and honesty for the audience that does NOT appreciate openness and honesty enough].
Ratner just got complacent and forgot he was on a hot mic.
He called his company's product "crap" at a 6,000-person event. That seemed pretty straight forward to me.
Maybe he did it because he's not very smart?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
At the very least they could've scrapped the boards and taken the tax writeoff.
These types of products succeed because of a shared delusion. Take fashion for instance. Everyone believes some clothes are more fashionable than others. The way you dress says a lot about you but why? It's simply because other people think it does. If the delusion runs into reality from the person hawking it, it can collapse quite quickly.
Psychology has a definition named the halo effect and it's very real. A person definitely gains advantages in society when they appear more attractive than less attractive. Naturally people associate good health with attractiveness and it's hard wired in us for finding a healthy mate compared to an unhealthy mate. Good choice of clothing for the frame of a person can enhance personal features and make a person look better than if wearing something less fitting. So there is some benefit & gain that can be made with understanding fashion of clothes as a real benefit. Is the advantage based on a delusion of a person being more healthy than another? Sure, but it isn't because people intentionally have a delusion about one shirt looking better than another.
We are more than hardwired to find the most capable mate. We're also hardwired to pick up social cues so if a large enough group of people believe something, we believe it too. If everyone you knew started wearing those MC Hammer pants tomorrow, how long would you hold out? If people suddenly and entirely stopped wearing ties with suits, would continue to wear the most unnecessary accessory ever? Why does everyone in tech dress so similarly?
If you're a man who wants a wife, this is a clear level headed choice to make. I think delusion as a term should not include optimal choices made by individual actors.
Sometimes it makes rational, logical sense to play the game. It's a form of intentional stupidity. Forgoing your rationality to get the things you want. If you ever worked at a large enough company, I'm sure you understand.
Sure, nobody might expect much of a pair of earrings bought to wear at a party for a couple of pounds, but you'd be upset if you bought an engagement ring and the stone fell out.
I like to think I’d prefer Apple products over the competition and pay a premium for them even if I didn’t know Jobs or Ive, or watched the marketing videos - but I’m not entirely sure these days. I Tim Cook said Apple products were super cheap to produce, or Ive said he didn’t design any of them and had some intern do it, would sales tank?
A Rolex and a Timex will both tell you the time. An iPhone and a $129 Android will do mostly similar things. A Toyota Camry and a Porsche will both get you to work.
But practical utility and value aren't necessarily the most important thing.
Apple intuitively understood this, at a time when other computer companies didn't. Lots of people look at a Macbook and see an overpriced computer that costs a few hundred dollars more than a similarly equipped PC, albeit in a pretty case. But that's the point - lots of people want their computer to look good!
Apple products are relatively cheap to produce - and they make an enormous margin on their hardware. But it doesn't feel cheap. The boxes are substantial. The finishings are high quality. The user experience is taken care of. Other PC makers might have been much cheaper, but you notice that to do so, they've cut corners in places.
I don't think the lesson here is in what he said, but rather that he made his customers feel like idiots. Only a fool would believe that a ring for £1 has the level of quality and craftsmanship that you'd get with a £100 ring, but you don't want to feel like a dumbass for buying it. You don't go to McDonalds with expectations of buying a Michelin Star meal. You go there for something warm & tasty, that comes out quickly.
That's not the practical utility people want out of a Porsche. They want the practical utility of impressing people (including the other sex), appearing well off and sporty, etc.
Those are also practical considerations - just not the first that come to mind when one thinks of cars (although not very far).
(Practical as in: not aesthetic but with real life impact on real life goals).
>Apple products are relatively cheap to produce
So they say, but e.g. other manufacturers tried for the first 2-3 years years to get a tablet with the specs of the iPad, and still couldn't get theirs at a lower price...
Or how if you add the same SSD/video/memory/CPU/etc options to a PC laptop, you get close to the same prices. I know cause I've tried to build an equivalent Lenovo (and a few other brands) and it gets so close I might as well just get the MBP.
And it's not gonna do that if the CEO shits on his own product. Things that are good because they are good are less vulnerable than things whose value comes from being impressive because of marketing.
I was shopping for a dev laptop about a year or two ago, and it was more like double the price rather than just a few hundred dollars more.
An XPS 15 with 32GB RAM, a decently speedy 1TB SSD, the basic display, dedicated graphics, and a 5.0 GHz 8 core i9 costs like $2.3K [1].
I couldn't customize the XPS enough to do a direct comparison. But the XPS 15 with the almost the same specs as the MacBook other than having an i7 was about 1.6K.
• 0 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/15-inch
• 1 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-15-lapt...
There are reasons for owning a watch other than "tell the time," which could include "tell the time accurately without ever needing to change batteries," or "tell the time and date," or "tell the time while scuba diving."
Rolex may be overkill but different watches serve different roles, and it's not just brand name alone that makes Rolex cost orders of magnitude more - in many ways, it really is just that much better of a product. Same for Camry vs Porsche.
An Apple product, particularly a Macbook, on the other hand, not so much. It's a nice aluminum chassis over crappy, cheap internals that break so often people throw around words like "class action" to describe the keyboards. It's like cramming a knock-off Timex movement into a Rolex case.
A Casio is going to tell the time better than a Rolex. Quartz watches are much more precise, and they’re powered by batteries, so last much longer without any maintenance. Rolex is simply in the segment of high quality, hand made mechanical watches. A segment people like for reasons other than its precision in keeping time.
For people interested in reading further, Marx's Capital is excellent at defining these terms very precisely:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value
If your priorities are telling time, having a smartphone, and commuting to work, I agree with you. But I think the more expensive products you mention offer things the cheaper products don't.
For example, I'd rather have a Camry if I needed a family car with a reasonable total cost of ownership. I'd want a Porsche if I wanted a fast & sporty car.
I think stronger examples would be comparing cheap & quality products that both cater to the same market segment. For example, making a cheap car that cuts corners on expensive parts like emissions controls, safety equipment, and stitching in the seats, but making it look & feel like a Camry. Eventually that a line of cheap cars will develop a reputation for being an overpriced junky deathtraps, and no amount of marketing will hide that.
https://www.quora.com/Arent-Lexus-cars-just-Toyotas-with-fan...
My takeaway is that between two similar products, once people discover what is really going on, will they feel misled? And can people become informed in the first place?
In the case of Lexus vs Gotta, I'd guess informed consumers won't feel mislead. In the case of quality Camry vs a junky FauxCamry, it's more about being marketing in the FauxCamry that deceptively over promises is on a car that under delivers.
I think I've stretched this analysis about as much as I can.
Also, in many cases, Japanese luxury models under their own nameplate were sold under the parent company name overseas, like in Japan. For instance, the original Acura NSX was the Honda NSX elsewhere.
But you'll look damn good sitting at the side of the road...
People making these decisions often claim their choices are made on purely rational grounds. But why then do large companies choose to spend so much money marketing things like Kubernetes, React, MongoDB, Red Hat Linux, etc? Surely these high-quality projects would stand their own in a marketplace of open code even without the money...
Some software companies like Oracle tell their stories primarily to corporate buyers, and developers sneer at them, thinking they're too smart to fall for that. Other companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have learned to tell their stories in ways that leave developers oblivious that they're being marketed to.
Care to elaborate what your distinction here is? I don't see it.
What story does one of the most expensive paintings of all time, Jackson Pollock #5, tell?
Comparing a windows laptop with highier specs with a macbook is like to compare a stupid blonde with big tits with a smart, classy and well tempered brunette. The cover is flashier and catch the attention on first sight but it's a burden to live with on a daily basis.
As a young lady my GF used to sell her handmade costume Jewelry on the street in New York. She said the key to selling was a card with a story. That was the difference between selling a brooch made of glass, brass and random bits held together with glue for $10-20 and not selling at all.
Things are different with utility items. I remember a retailer (my brain won't cough up the name, but every man over 40 would recognize them). He said his brand was, well made spiffy but not too spiffy men's clothes. His profit margin depended an a working age man being able to go in, buy a couple of shirts, pants, and a coat knowing he wouldn't look like a dork when he wore them to work.
I feel like that's Apple products too.
I don't buy Apple products for its story. I buy Apple products because I don't have to spend time doing tech support/dealing with malware for my parents and if something breaks I can go get a replacement at the Apple store immediately.
I had dealt with 'chocolate' diamonds for years, I currently have hundreds in my wood shop! My father works as a machinist, and brown, low-quality diamonds are their abrasive of choice for many jobs. They're (or rather, they were) super cheap because they were such low quality. I always swiped a handful when I visited him at work as a kid, because they made great pellets (they were exceptionally tiny and really hard) for my slingshot. I had a whole jug of them and just forgot about the things.
And now here we are.
Chocolate diamonds are a direct contradiction of regular diamond marketing. If you go to great lengths to talk about how important clarity is when justifying your diamonds' prices, it's particularly silly when you start selling the least clear diamonds possible.
The first shop she took it to offered a little under 10% of what it cost. She thought the shop was trying to scam her, so she went to a bunch of other shops, and they all offered less. So she went back to the first shop a couple of days later, and there was a different guy there who told her that the first guy was an idiot who overvalued the diamond. It was a piece of junk, and it was worth well under 10% of what it cost. The jeweler also pointed out, in detail, that the diamond itself was really shitty even by the standards of wedding rings. But because they already made that offer, they decided to honor it anyway just to avoid any drama. And so my mom sold a ring that cost her and my dad $30k for about $2600.
And I understand that's normal. Retailers mark new diamond rings up like crazy because that's how much people are willing to pay for a wedding ring, even if it's not what the stone is actually worth.
IMHO this is how diamonds have proliferated for so long despite having minimal intrinsic value.
It's a glass bottle, it doesn't leak, it doesn't shatter when you pick it up. Apart from appearance, how much better quality could it usefully be?
The engineer in me takes things at face value: measured, empirical and framed in the right context. But I can understand the salesman approach to selling: you need to promote your product as the best.
This is especially true for the markets where valuations are pretty much "maxed out" and at all time highs. So the market runs on optimism and future expectations. The market will go up because I say it will go up! Nothing wrong with that perspective IMHO - insofar as talking about the markets.
Secondly, why did it have any effect? Who would change their practices because of this? It really rams home how deeply brands are integrated into our understanding of value.
How depressing.
Seeing things from her perspective is pretty interesting, to say the least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq7Eh6JTKIg
John Oliver starts the discussion, but there is a Lewinsky interview which is very eye-opening for me.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/monica-lewinsky-in-t...
These are the types of things most men don't have to worry about.
My co-worker went got me fired because I didn't accept her advances. It's a long story but she accused me of hitting on her, when in reality she was hitting on me and I was just ignoring her. A bunch of other guys supported her (idk why, I didn't know those guys much but they supported her even tho she is a pathological lier.)
I don't know, I have somewhat different thinking about sex in professional settings. I tend to see women as more capable of using their own judgement in those situations and less needing of protection. That's not always the case though, like with Harvey Weinstein.
Edit: comment if you disagree, downvotes won't change my opinion.
As such, it was Lewinsky's name who appeared in songs, raps, TV shows, movies, etc. etc. to describe the political drama at the time.
https://genius.com/Saint-jhn-monica-lewinsky-lyrics
Lewinsky also had to describe her sexual acts to Congress, publicly aired across television networks nationwide, before the age of social media. Lewinsky basically got to experience the entire "social media outrage" machine before social media even existed. EDIT: Of course, Bill Clinton just lied about it, so there's the whole Lewinsky is just "trying to get attention" angle as well going on.
It was Lewinsky's word vs the President's. It was very much a a big political drama at the time, and Lewinsky drew the short-stick of the arrangement as the 22-year old intern. And again: the powers that be were the Republicans pushing to impeach the President, and Clinton who was lying to defend himself. Etc. etc. It was a very big scandal, but I don't think Lewinsky actually did anything wrong throughout it all. But her name was unfairly attached to the whole event.
Instead of listing lyrics myself... I searched around for maybe an article + writer who is better than me at this sort of thing. This article may be what you're looking for: https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/every-rap-song-that-mentions-...
[1] http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/monica
It's not a victim olympics, but I don't think anyone can claim the repercussions for him were small or light.
But definitely because of how Ken Starr and the national media treated her.
It's part of the reason you aren't supposed to have relationships with someone you manage.
Sex/romance with a subordinate in any organization is such a bad idea for so many reasons. Possibility of coercion is one, favoritism and dissent among other subordinates is another.
A direct report is definitely a bad idea, but what if it's someone who reports to one of your reports?
Or someone who report to another manager?
etc.
At some point it should become ok. Completely forbidding people to find romance at the workplace would make it feel so gray, especially given the time you sink in it.
https://slate.com/slow-burn
Impeccable journalism and incredible interviews are given.
Cambridge: "impossible or very difficult to believe:"
Dictionary.com: "so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable: The plot of the book is incredible."
Or is dictionary.com too incredible?
And, I know I'm risking hardcore my karma here, but I see "good" used as a moral measure. I doubt that "incredible" is referring to the interviewee's moral excellence, but I could imagine that perhaps the interviews are along the lines of becoming a better person.
As long as we're quoting dictionary definitions (also from dictionary.com). We're using definition 2, here:
incredible adjective
1. beyond belief or understanding; unbelievable
2. informal marvellous; amazing
Good is definitely a judgment, but there is no reason to suppose it is a moral one. If I say a sandwich is good, it means that I like the taste not that I think it is righteous in the eyes of God. Ironically, perhaps, if I thought the sandwich was especially delicious, I might say that it is righteous. The vast majority of native English speakers would immediately understand my intended meaning rather than the literal one.
I find it somewhat incredible that I have to explain this.
People talk about the power imbalance, but at the end of the day there are a lot of people who sleep with their superiors because they want to rather than being coerced (explicitly or implicitly). I don't think we'll ever truly know if she was coerced or not, but we know for sure that she kept that clothing.
And I think this is the tipping point for most people. Everyone understands that she may have been a victim in it.
I think you might be being too generous with "everyone."
I got the direct impression from the news that Monica Lewinsky was this pretty young thing, very innocent, who had a tryst with the POTUS and was freaking out. Linda Tripp came along and under a false veneer of sophistication and helpfulness, instructed Monica on what to do, move-by-move.
The story was of an ingenue who was, in turn, under the thrall of the POTUS and then Linda Tripp.
You believe Lewinsky was a victim of what, exactly? She might have been extensively mistreated by the press but that's it.
Being pressured into a sexual relationship by her superior, who was by many standards the most powerful person on the planet at the time?
Like, regardless of whether you believe that's true or not it's pretty obvious how people might arrive at the conclusion that she was a victim and why there's debate about it.
That baseless assertion was excluded from the onset of the case, was never a realistic assumption, and since then this conspiracy theory was put to rest.
So, besides made-up nonsense, you believe Lewinsky was a victim of what exactly?
The following is how it gets interpreted by a lot of people and has no connection whatsoever to my own opinions of these two people:
Clinton having an affair with an intern was seen as bad because of the infidelity, but at the same time it makes him look virile and manly. It’s a mixed bag but he comes out looking pretty good overall.
An intern having an affair with Clinton is bad because it makes her a slut and she should have resisted her carnal urges. And she had an affair with a married man, so she’s a home wrecker too! There’s no positive aspect to this at all, and it’s all her fault for not behaving. And then her misbehavior gets plastered all over the national news, and she gets the shaming she deserves!
That's changing, it's now no shame for a woman to have multiple partners or one night stands, everyone's on tinder.
I loved John Oliver on the Daily Show, but I find Last Week Tonight formulaic and dull. It's the identical shtick every week with a different topic to be outraged over.
It's an educational/advocacy show with a veneer of comedy.
It's like Michael Moore. He's obviously too biased to have a fair view.
Some of Oliver's arguments are "weak", feeling like he's sometimes padding for time. With that being said, Oliver is far better at this format than say... Bill Nye. (I was... saddened, by the weak treatment of subjects on that show)
Colbert seems to be focusing more on a typical late-night formula (talk with celebrities to promote books and movies, primarily on "safe" subjects: see his "Meanwhile" segments, which are hilarious but otherwise pallet cleansers). Colbert barely has much more than 5-minute talks on any political subject these days... a good thing for the mass-audience, but too short to really dive deeply into a subject matter outside of highlighting a few headlines.
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Overall, Oliver is one of the better shows in this category. But certainly has its flaws. No one really beats John Stewart, who really mastered the segment and earned my trust. (Stewart even had to do this in a far more difficult setting: once per night, 4 times a week. Oliver only has to prep for one segment per week). Stewart certainly had his mistakes, but he also humbled himself with constant reminders that Stewart was a "sad clown", reminding the audience that his skits were primarily driven for entertainment (even if large bits were educational)
The main difference between Oliver and Stewart is that Oliver seems to have fewer self-deprecating bits, or reminders that Oliver is primarily a sad clown as well. Entertainment outrage... relatively well researched, but still entertainment nonetheless.
Maybe I should watch Trevor Noah and see how he's keeping up the old Stewart timeslot.
> He's obviously too biased to have a fair view.
Stewart was biased, but overwhelmingly fair in my experience. Yeah, he leaned left, but no one can deny their own personal bias on political subjects, and that's fine IMO.
Oliver is biased, but IMO isn't as fair as Stewart in all subject matters. Fortunately, Oliver is "fair enough" and still has a decent show.
It blows my mind that comedians now have the moral and factual authority, forfeited by the nominal news and pundit people.
Further, it again shows that anything taken to its logical extreme becomes the opposite. Roger Ailes (and others) had the keen insight of treating news as entertainment. John Oliver (and others) have taken that notion full circle, restoring the "inform the audience" role.
The original gaffe was selling people crap and not telling them it's crap.
“We work hard to keep our prices low by carefully selecting affordable materials while still providing stylish, attractive and fashionable products our customers love.”
...or:
“Our products are crap, the materials in them are crap, and by virtue of buying them, our customers assert that all they want is crap.”
Producing low cost items is not the issue, and naturally the quality is less with low cost items. People understood they weren’t buying high-grade platinum. It’s the expressed sentiment of the company leader was the gaffe.
The previously implied sentiment was "I'm selling you upmarket glamour at an affordable price."
Branding isn't about the product, it's about buying a relationship with an entity that has more power and charisma than you do.
If you change the implied terms of the relationship, you damage the brand's value.
It's why people get so furious when Apple stiffs them with products that fail and then fobs them off with poor after-care.
Apple's implied sentiment used to be "You're an important and unusually gifted person with excellent taste."
After Cook it's more like "We've taken your money. Why are you still here?"
> Have you ever heard of the “Ratner effect”?
> Well by the end of this post you will know what it means.
Wikipedia is probably the best bet.
> During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russi...
People love to brag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signet_Jewelers
https://thehustle.co/gerald-ratners-billion-dollar-speech
Ratner merely put down the last piece that flipped almost the whole board. Marketing is usually the uphill struggle to persuade anyone looking at the board that "white is winning" when it is really anyone's game.
But eventually one piece is played, often a public failure, and everyone realises the board was destined to be black anyway.
It's much harder to play this marketing game when you are selling costume jewellery or other fashion lead items. And the odds of someone flipping the board are high without you realising it.
But people play it that way anyway.
What made the brand successful wasn't what Ratner thought it was.
The word at hand here is 'hubris'. Successful people slowly lose touch with the rest of the world and eventually make a colossal screw-up.
There's probably a counterfactual universe where he remained in his position, he learned a valuable lesson on keeping his mouth shut in public, and the company re-branded and recovered on a similar trajectory.
It wasn't, the company was going from strength to strength.
And whether "eventually it would flip" is another thing, and is irrelevant to this argument. Sure, every company will go down at some point.
That doesn't validate the idea put forward that this was some kind of "final piece" and the company was ready to flip anyway. There's absolutely no evidence for that. Your argument presupposes what it should prove.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
- The Sun Also Rises
There are other stories of people giving away huge fortunes prehumously because they might think the money is better used elsewhere.
Or Maybe you don't like hanging out with rich people, when you're very rich you can't hang out with poor people. You can but you have to probably lie about your wealth.
The CEO could quite honestly say that their goals are consistency, speed, food safety, and affordability. Quality? I expect the honest response would be something along the lines of 1.) Millions of customers apparently like our product and 2.) We try to deliver the best quality product we can subject to our customers' other priorities. The CEO probably believes this to some degree or other. They're not trying to deliver a high-end steakhouse experience. McDonald's isn't even trying to deliver a Shake Shack experience--which maybe costs 2x (at least)?
I'm pretty sure nearly every McDonalds customer thinks the same way. They want quick, cheap, safely prepared food that tastes good enough to eat.
But that's not a value judgement. Just how I personally prefer to eat.
It's complete garbage compared to what the CEO is eating, and while everybody knows that, the CEO will never state it publicly. The story about Ratner is a direct example of what would happen.
Perspective.