Tag: Duane Jones
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Who’s the bedbug 2
Latest pithy point from Kirn: It takes only moments for AI to “write” a book, but it will still take hours, even days, for a person to read one. It used to be the other way around; the writer labored far longer than the reader. It made reading books feel worthwhile, to know that. Now?…
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Who’s the bedbug?
Earlier I talked about Marx’s real purpose. He was a scholar, not a politician, and he was trying to disprove the economist theory of marginal utility. In theory every product is identical except for price, and consumers choose products SOLELY on price. The real world doesn’t work that way. Every product is different, just as…
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Wrong sense?
This morning’s paper mail included an envelope with an interesting visual texture, which turned out to be a tactile texture. The paper is very slightly corrugated, so the fingers vibrate when handling this envelope. Rumble strips. Was the ad aimed at old folks losing their vision? No, it was from Beltone Hearing Aids. Makes sense,…
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More Jones
Continuing from previous item. There’s a more important factor. It’s not just the asking, it’s the location of the ask. The DeSantis campaign hasn’t appeared in my email, AND the DeSantis campaign hasn’t been using Substack. Haley used both. The Haley campaign seems to understand that their buyers are disgusted with mass media. The DeSantis…
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She asked
I swore I’d never donate to another politician. Just now I donated to Nikki Haley’s campaign. Why? She is a neocon, but she’s firmly on the right side on NAZI TORTURE, and has a good governing record on industry vs finance. DeSantis has a MUCH stronger record on the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS, but he…
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Marx is the real ledger 2
From Wikipedia: Marx was a scholar, not a politician. He was primarily concerned with disproving the concept of marginal utility. He didn’t want to publish volumes 2 and 3 of Capital until he could disprove the concept to his satisfaction, which he never did. Engels and others saw the power-mongering potential and published the rest.…
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Fractal exploration
From the Twitter of Bitsavers, one of the Blessed Preservers of this world: Book that doesn’t exist that needs to: “The Fractal Geometry of Writing” The thought actually started out that whenever I start writing something, I end up going down ratholes that each turn into something that would end up being the length of…
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Refunders vs hoarders
This is completely irrelevant and overly nuanced, but it’s what I want to write about today…. Duane Jones, in his wonderful little book about advertising and human nature, gets hardass at times. He talks openly about forcing a purchase. Here he’s discussing the money-back guarantee: = = = = = Mr Burke was silent for…
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If it’s a trend…
The folks at TheFederalist are still trying to claim a trend toward genuine populism on the R side. They claim that the defeat of Liz Cheney marks a pulling away from Bush/Cheney neocons. I doubt it. A much simpler explanation is the Trump personality cult, which is pretty much the only thing in Repooflican minds…
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Immersion is the key
Looked again at the Austin “free” university, which is still waiting for accreditation so it can say the same things all the other universities are saying. The website had an article by Boghossian, one of the big Cancelleds. This led to his Youtube channel where he “challenges” the beliefs of the wokesters in Socratic style.…
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Some fishy rambling on AI
Creativity can be measured commercially. A new product gains profit when it serves some people better than an existing product. Duane Jones emphasized the need to find your niche and defend it. An older product generally broadens and simplifies to be halfway pleasing to a broad range of cultures and places and personalities, which leaves…
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It’s Bab-O all the way down!
Duane Jones told several stories about his campaigns for Bab-O soaps and cleansers. He also told how the Babbitt Soap Company invented the whole concept of the premium: Around 1850, Benjamin Babbitt had switched from machinist to soap-maker, because he believed that in the long run it would prove more profitable. And being a shrewd…
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WWJD?
This week I’ve been quoting Duane Jones’s 1955 book on marketing and business practices. What would Jones say about Bitcoin and Metaverse and NFT? Facebook is primarily an advertising agency, so it certainly fits inside the topic. Jones couldn’t have imagined such MAGNIFICENT STUPIDITY. He worked in a period (1930-1960) when businesses functioned on PROFIT,…
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Temporation vs Parkinson
Civilization requires resonance. A strong culture has a place for everyone and a time for everything, at the daily level and the seasonal level and the lifetime level. Detemporation is a prime murder weapon for demons. In every conceivable way, demons break up natural resonances. Deepstate-sponsored music and art are atonal and random. Psychopaths give…
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As usual
As usual, Denyse at MindMatters has a funny take on AI attempting to write ad copy. AI can provide cues and alternate phrasings, but humans have to generate the ideas and select the phrases that work. As usual, Duane Jones handled this question in 1955, though not with computers in mind. (Computers were already trying…
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