Thoughts from the Beanbag
These are my unfiltered thoughts on content I’ve consumed recently. Consider this a trigger warning :)
The Friendship Test
Having been on the road for a bit lately, it’s been great to reconnect with friends. I’m reminded of an old piece of writing by CS Lewis called “The Four Loves” that I had read back when I was a Christian. In it he describes “The Friendship Test” which is a three part criteria.
Test 1: No matter the magnitude of time, distance, or circumstance, when you return with your friend you feel completed united to where you left off.
Test 2: There’s no keeping of score of favors given or returned.
The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly.
Test 3: Is not concerned with the social status or social circumstance of the friend.
Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man's Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living […] In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about any one else's family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. [….] At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C.S. Lewis’s work serves as a fantastic lesson to me for resisting the urge to throw out generally unproductive frameworks (like religion) part and parcel. There’s a little truth in every lie, I suppose, and the same is true for ideologies.
For those of us that are friends, I thank you for your friendship and hope everyone has people in their lives that would pass C.S. Lewis’ Friendship Test.
Gillette’s Road to Damascus
I was walking down the road of toxic masculinity - you know, being all sexist, racist, and rape-y - until I watched this Gillette ad and decided to change my ways. I’m sure many other men had the same reaction :)
What catalyzed Gillette to pivot so hard on their messaging? Afterall I don’t think of Proctor and Gamble, the company who owns Gillette, as rewarding senior management for an avant garde aesthetic.
Let’s take a look at the financials. P&G’s “Grooming” global business segment owns the Braun, Fusion, Gillette, Mach3, Prestobarba, and Venus brands and represents 10% of P&G’s total sales and 14% of earnings. It’s the smallest of five business segments but largest by total assets.
That’s the kind of top line and earnings decline that feeds desperation into any management team.
Reading the tea leaves of the annual reports, I think the decline is actually much worse than these numbers would have you believe. Keep in mind that Venus’ numbers are aggregated within the Grooming segment and I’m going to assume feminine grooming has held steady. In the 2012 annual report they broke out “male grooming” as product category that was 9% of total sales. “Male grooming” has since dropped out of the annual report which probably means it’s less than 5% of total sales since they break out the significant product groups by name. Bottom line: half of the Grooming segment's sales and EBIT are probably from Venus and all of the decline is from male grooming.
Basically, the unwillingness of degenerates like me to shave has become an existential threat to the Grooming business. So P&G is taking a big swing because you’ve got to do something and anything is better than dying a long, slow death. Even though the ad was a desperation move, I respect it. Good on them.
Men who probably wouldn’t use Gillette if they lived today
The best way to describe Peter Freuchen is to show you a picture of him.
Let’s talk about some of the things this viking did. Peter studied as a doctor, settled in the Arctic after discovering Inuits in an expedition, married an Inuit, buried her body himself after she died of the Spanish Influenza, amputated his own toes, lost his leg, got caught in a ice cocoon during a blizzard and molded his own shit into a knife to carve his way out, wrote an Oscar winning movie, starred in his own Oscar winning movie, joined the Danish resistance to the Nazi’s, was captured and sentenced to death, escaped, and won the game show $64,000 question.
I saw this mugshot of Frank Sinatra and dug into the backstory a bit. Usually mugshots are (perhaps intentionally) unflattering but it doesn’t surprise me that Frank Sinatra’s would look like a movie poster:
The charges are equally movie worthy. From the FBI report, "On the second and ninth days of November, 1938 at the Borough of Lodi . . . under the promise of marriage, (SINATRA) did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant who was then and there a single female of good repute." That’s the actual charge. Laws were weird in 1938. "This complaint was withdrawn on 12/7/38 because it was ascertained that the complainant was in fact married." So new charge: adultry. Frank somehow gets represented by a former congressman because I guess that’s how the mob worked back then and the case was dropped.
This all happened when he was 23.
Eat Pray Love or Meat Play Lust?
I tend to think of dating as a marketplace. Fortunately for me some researchers at UMichigan do too and wrote a paper on desirability in online dating (n=186,935).
We learn in “Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets” that
...average desirability varies with age for both men and women, although it varies more strongly for women, and the effects run in opposite directions: Older women are less desirable, while older men are more so. For women, this pattern holds over the full range of ages on the site: The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines. In keeping with previous work, there is also a clear and consistent dependence on ethnicity, with Asian women and white men being the most desirable potential mates by our measures across all four cities [....] Desirability is associated with education most strongly for men, for whom more education is always more desirable. For women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable; postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women. These measurements control for age, so the latter observation is not a result of women with postgraduate degrees being older
That jives with my lived experience and the anecdotes from guys like me. It’s a great time to be a guy. The bar has never been lower. All you have to do is not take your penis out and masturbate and women are like, ‘He’s a feminist. He is clearly an ally’.
So I’m basically as hot as a generic 25 year old woman except getting hotter by the year. Part of me feels ashamed by this realization. Not so much that I won the sperm lottery but more that when I think of all the fickle and ridiculous bullshit that early 20’s women pull off, I’m really not living up to that bar.
Alas, there's a big leap between measures of desirability and quality of connection - however you'd measure that. This work is helpful in enumerating relative market values for desirability. But that's only really helpful if you're on a Meat Play Lust journey not an Eat Pray Love one.
Feed me a Stray Cat
One of my favorite movies is American Psycho and one of the stranger scenes is when an ATM prompts Patrick Bateman to feed it a stray cat. I never really understood the meaning of the line and chalked it up to artistic weirdness. But recently I learned that “during the 18th century, the price of admission [to the London zoo] was… the supply of a cat or dog to be fed to the lions”. Art imitates Life once again.
Opportunities
Mike’s looking for some great sales people so send him your referrals.
Potpourri
Your approach to calendar reform will not work because the set of technical and cultural dependencies and inconvenient approximations are too great to overcome. This could be said about any number of other reform measures and serves as a reminder of why reforming a legacy system is a legitimately hard problem. There’s a lot of work to be done in this area.
I found this Al Shabaab propaganda video to be a stark reminder that a small but significant cohort of American service members are fighting in conflicts overseas today. Also today there are no 50 inside the beltway pseudo intellectuals who could articulate a coherent strategy that involves winning and no single person who’s ultimately accountable for winning.
Treasury’s release of U.S. citizen renunciation shows 1,107 less Americans in Q3 2018. This is a continued decline from the highs of 2016. I keep loose tabs on these numbers as a large spike can indicate broad behavior shifts amongst the wealthy.
By my back of the envelope math, this represents roughly $1bn in lost tax revenues in perpetuity... per year
I've noticed clipart-esque human depictions making a comeback in marketing material. I’m very much a proponent of any design alternative to lame stock photos. Here’s the library for anyone interested.
Some junior congressman said some words about a 70% marginal tax rate. Economists don’t seem convinced it would even raise tax revenues (except the ones from MIT).
Hip hop has the highest variability of unique words. However there wasn’t much effort made to deduplicate various spelling of the same words, e.g. shorty vs shawty or king shit vs kingshit
I've been digging into polling data for a project I’m doing. Two observations: 1) I think it’s really cool that they’re polling sentiment on discrete tweets. That seems like a more pragmatic alternative to issue based polling since it packages the content and delivery together 2) 44% of registered voters approve of POTUS. That’s 9 out of 20 people. Depending on your social circle that may be a lot higher than you thought.
Remember, there are considerable tax benefits for investing in oil operations.