I love Dilbert and never saw it as overtly political although sometimes Scott Adams can be. But apparently you cannot joke about ESG without consequences.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. It originated with Wall Street and is applied to making investments in companies that governed in a sustainable and ethical way. As corporations adopt ESG it seems a lot of the talk seems to be focused around hiring quotas.
Well, unless that 80% has overlapped with the last 5 years, you'll have missed it.
But anyone who reads company annual reports (eg. for personal investing), or the financial bits of a newspaper (online or otherwise), or even reads their annual superannuation statement, would very likely have seen the term used (in OZ).
ESG = Environmentally Sustainable Governance, AKA a certain set of standards of investment on public firms. There are many activist funds and investment managers on the world nowadays.
Another, maybe more infamous example is the Sharia-complaint stock grouping, which bans alcohol, tobacco, military industry, pork, and the sex industry.
You don't think having a black character that "identifies as white" and according to the article makes his boss happy to have met his diversity quota is political?
I liked Dilbert a long time ago (90s-early 00s, where I saw it as kind of a window into adult work life as a teenager).
The headline here made me think that a particular Dilbert strip had been removed from papers due to being offensive or some such.
All comics have their day I suppose. I have enjoyed Dilbert sometimes. I think that the real story here is that newspaper comics are a dying breed as it is. I have fond memories of reading the funnies at my kitchen table before school. But I rarely dip into even webcomics anymore.
It's an interesting side-effect of news being so concentrated that it's owned by a few massive for-profit corporations. Random, independent decisions still have huge effects.
you don't know it not to be true, you prefer that explanation.
but Dilbert, being a popular and therefore an expensive strip with high name recognition, and written by someone who rejects woke ideology, fits either way.
> In recent years, Adams has poked fun at themes related to the workplace, most recently Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues and the introduction of a new character named "Dave," who is Black but identifies as White.
Scott Adams has become very political (perhaps he always was). With that he's managed to alienate a subset of his customers, myself included.
This may or may not have been related to the removal from the newspapers (Fox News wants to suggest it was).
Regardless of what motivated these removals, taking Dilbert off the newspaper is probably looked upon favourably as improving the "S" of its ESG rating, but not as much as going digital and paperless is supposed to make the "E" look good.
Knowing Adams he probably has a sockpuppet on HN ready to praise the virtues of Dilbert and Scott Adams.
Dilbert has not been culturally relevant for over 2 decades, and Scott Adams hasn't even stepped into an office setting in that time. Gee wonder why it got the axe.
The only thing that ever keeps Adams in the news is when he's using a mass shooting to promote his apps or when he decries being cancelled.
There's probably a lead time when stuff that was contracted previously is yet to be published.
Analogous to when you hear that a TV series has been cancelled and the current series is still being screened until all the episodes in the series have been shown.
It's just business. If it's already been paid for, you will lose that money if you stop using it immediately.
Headline makes it seem like Dilbert was the cause. Article is also misleading: Adams states "why they decided what was in and what was out, that's not known to anybody except them, I guess"
Except they already announced the reasoning. Lee Enterprises is losing money on print, transitioning to alternative digital formats, and they're reducing costs across the board, including removing all non-Andrews McMeel syndicated cartoons:
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 95.4 ms ] threadThat's not impossible of course, but it's not like I was uninvolved in those topics.
Either way it's still not an second language thing. It's a using acronyms without definition thing.
But anyone who reads company annual reports (eg. for personal investing), or the financial bits of a newspaper (online or otherwise), or even reads their annual superannuation statement, would very likely have seen the term used (in OZ).
I haven't really seen it crop up in the online stuff I read (some of it Australian financial), but I can see how it would be easy to miss as well.
Another, maybe more infamous example is the Sharia-complaint stock grouping, which bans alcohol, tobacco, military industry, pork, and the sex industry.
Yes I have some investment in the latter indices.
I liked Dilbert a long time ago (90s-early 00s, where I saw it as kind of a window into adult work life as a teenager).
All comics have their day I suppose. I have enjoyed Dilbert sometimes. I think that the real story here is that newspaper comics are a dying breed as it is. I have fond memories of reading the funnies at my kitchen table before school. But I rarely dip into even webcomics anymore.
I'd be more concerned about BC and the wizard of Id
HN: Dilbert removed from over seventy newspapers
Fox: 'Dilbert' author Scott Adams says comic strip about corporate office culture removed from 77 newspapers
subhead: Scott Adams has authored 'Dilbert' since 1989 but said newspaper owner Lee Enterprises has ended the comic in dozens of its publications
but Dilbert, being a popular and therefore an expensive strip with high name recognition, and written by someone who rejects woke ideology, fits either way.
Scott Adams has become very political (perhaps he always was). With that he's managed to alienate a subset of his customers, myself included.
This may or may not have been related to the removal from the newspapers (Fox News wants to suggest it was).
Dilbert has not been culturally relevant for over 2 decades, and Scott Adams hasn't even stepped into an office setting in that time. Gee wonder why it got the axe.
The only thing that ever keeps Adams in the news is when he's using a mass shooting to promote his apps or when he decries being cancelled.
Analogous to when you hear that a TV series has been cancelled and the current series is still being screened until all the episodes in the series have been shown.
It's just business. If it's already been paid for, you will lose that money if you stop using it immediately.
Except they already announced the reasoning. Lee Enterprises is losing money on print, transitioning to alternative digital formats, and they're reducing costs across the board, including removing all non-Andrews McMeel syndicated cartoons:
- https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/09/11/lee-pap...
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lee-enterprises-reports-third...
- https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2022/9/16/has-bizarro-been-canc...
Not a mystery, and not a Dilbert specific thing.