09 June 2009

Dear Mr Griffin,

We couldn’t help but notice that there was egg on your face (and on your suit jacket) on the day after you were elected MEP for North West England.

Please don’t leave egg on ours.

You wore a Poppy lapel badge during your news conference to celebrate your election victory. This was in direct contravention of our polite request that you refrain from politicising one of the nation’s most treasured and beloved symbols.

The Poppy is the symbol of sacrifices made by British Armed Forces in conflicts both past and present and it has been paid for with blood and valour. True valour deserves respect regardless of a person’s ethnic origin, and everyone who serves or has served their country deserves nothing less.

The Poppy pin, the Poppy logo, and the paper Poppy worn during Remembrance are the property, trademark and emblem of The Royal British Legion.

For nearly 90 years, The Royal British Legion has pursued a policy of being scrupulously above the party political fray. It is vital that everyone - the media, the public and our beneficiaries - know that we will not allow our independence to be undermined or our reputation impaired by being closely associated with any one political party. This is more important now than ever.

On May 27th, 2009, the National Chairman of The Royal British Legion wrote to you privately requesting that you desist from wearing the Poppy or any other emblem that might be associated with the Legion at any of your public appearances during the European Parliamentary election campaign.

He appealed to your sense of honour. But you have responded by continuing to wear the poppy. So now we’re no longer asking you privately.

Stop it, Mr Griffin. Just stop it.

Regards,

The Royal British Legion

The Royal British Legion is the nation’s leading Armed Forces charity providing care and support to all members of the British Armed Forces past and present and their families. It is also the national Custodian of Remembrance and safeguards the Military Covenant between the nation and its Armed Forces. It is best known for the annual Poppy Appeal and its emblem, the red poppy.

http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/news/general/an-open-letter-to-nick-griffin-chairman-of-the-bnp-and-mep-for-north-west-england

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It’s taken from a 2001 (very musical) madcap scifi film (The American Astronaut) from the Sundance film festival that, as one commenter to the Youtube thread puts it, is “so utterly, almost unfathomably cool”.

Oh my christ. I quoted a youtube commenter, without any note of mockery or sarcasm

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Companies in Shanghai apparently have boxes on employee paperwork that ask for the ‘English name’ as well as the native name.

Here’s an interesting anecdote (via Freakonomics/New York Times):

Another of Hsu’s friends, who goes by dozens of names depending on the situation, tells him “a name is just a dai hao.”

Dai hao, or label / tag – something most netizens will be familiar with, given the prevalence of internet services requiring a username that (especially since the Web2.0 explosion of social services) becomes a major part of their face when interacting with the other users of the service – e.g. twitter handles, chatroom avatars, etc. The West has always had nicknames between friends – but to be introduced by others using your aliases, aliases that seemingly have parity with your given name – seems odd to me.

It doubt our society – already close to this point – is heading the same wayThere are, apparently, longstanding Chinese history and social dynamics (which I know too little about) are crucial to getting there.

Taking English names also fits with various traditional Chinese naming practices. In the past, children were given “milk names” when they were born, and then public names once they started school. Professionals and scholars used pseudonyms, or hao, that signified membership in an educated class. Confucius, born Kong Qiu, sometimes wrote under his zi, or courtesy name, Zhongni. Even now, Chinese sometimes take new names to mark the start of a new job, entry to graduate school, or a marriage, as my coworkers Alpha and Beta did. They subsequently named their son Gamma. (For the record, Alpha is the male.) (source)

I wonder what the effect is on psychology and commerce, when so little of your identity – even the name your parents gave you – is nailed down. I it empowering, to choose your own name and fully define your identity  (this, in a communist country!). Does it correlate with the abandon with which Chinese teens threw themselves into virtual worlds (see a pic below to see just how big this internet cafe we stumbled upon was – the first of many just like it) and buy virtual goods (a market estimated to be between $1-$2 bn, with some estimates in putting it at $5bn – now taxed at 20% by the Chinese government).

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This research examines how consumers’ food choices differ when healthy items are included in a choice set compared with when they are not available. Results demonstrate that individuals are, ironically, more likely to make indulgent food choices when a healthy item is available compared to when it is not available. The influence of the healthy item on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self?control. Support is found for a goal?activation?based explanation for these findings, whereby the mere presence of the healthy food option vicariously fulfills nutrition?related goals and provides consumers with a license to indulge

One thing to consider, though – true or not, there’s a rumour floating around that the salads are unhealthier due to the oily dressing. Shouldn’t this have been controlled for in the study?

Original paper; Initial coverage (Matt Yglesias); More

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You may remember from the other day, the Al Gore’s Giant Fraggin’ Mansion Effect. Or, as it’s alternately known, moral self-regulation.

This is a concept where people who are satisfied that they are “good,” will act bad. People primed to think positive thoughts about themselves will give less to charity; perhaps those pleased with their “green” Earth Day activities won’t feel bad about polluting a couple days later.

As I said before, basically, we’re constantly calculating the trade-off between being able to see ourselves as good people and the cost of engaging in all that non-advantageous goodness.

And, so, here’s a new permutation of this idea: A couple new studies suggests that white people who voted for Barack Obama may be so satisfied with their anti-racist credentials that they… act more racist.

Here’s what may be happening – too many people are weak in the face of peer pressure to give to causes they don’t believe in. Their contribution, in that case, is a bribe/ransom/blackmail payment. They go away from that transaction conflicted and, so goes the theory – less ready to engage and donate more meaningfully to the causes that actually stand a chance of getting under our skin.

Perhaps the government ought to ban street collectors for charities – those well-intentioned maniacs who will bear down on you, handshake extended, even as you desperately (and pathetically) pick up the pace and try to look away – at the nearest shop or at your phone.

This would, in the short term, vastly hurt the many charities that rely on this method of fundraising. But ultimately it would preserve goodwill for the social endeavours sector, and thus be a net benefiter.

With the rise of the internet and the work of good people such as Peter Dietz over at socialactions, niche causes (the Long Tail) are within easy access to all netizens – suggesting that the increased goodwill ought to rapidly spread to the sector in the form of hard-forged engagement with causes for all but the most bastardly amongst us!

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From my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist, this is how consumerist capitalism really works: it makes us forget our natural adaptations for showing off desirable fitness-related traits.  It deludes us into thinking that artificial products work much better than they really do for showing off these traits.  It confuses us about the traits we are trying to display by harping on vague terms at the wrong levels of description (wealth, status, taste), and by obfuscating the most stable, heritable, and predictive traits discovered by individual differences research.  It hints coyly at the possible status and sexual payoffs for buying and displaying premium products, but refuses to make such claims explicit, lest consumer watchdogs find those claims empirically false, and lest significant others get upset by the personal motives they reveal.  The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion — that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling.

from: Geoffrey Miller - Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

via: Tyler Cower – Marginal Revolution

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Here’s the astounding quote (or is it just poorly written copy by an angsty writer for their website?)

Skype is only available for free with 3 because we don’t think you should have to pay for mobile phone calls anymore. (source)

Now, I’ve used Skype on my phone in the past, but the big difference here is that that was over a 3G data connection which you pay big bucks by the MB (or, like me, a £5 a month fee for unlimited 3G data usage). This uses their normal voice network (voice circuit-switch rather than the more expensive 3G/HSDPA data network) – so no need for any data usage or packages.

What this does to the mobile ecosystem remains to be seen. 3UK has been the cutthroat MNO in the UK market ever since its inception, unable or unwilling to compete with O2, TMobile or Vodafone adspend (or in securing the best phone selection, such as the iPhone), but undercutting them on rates (a questionable policy given how opaque mobile tariff pricing is – you can’t undercut rivals if the whole picture is so muddy everyday punters can’t see that you’re that much better value). But this really takes the biscuit.

This is obviously an attempt to get new users, but more interestingly, there may be a deeper, more forward-thinking tactical side to this. The Skype app requires you to have a smartphone. This may finally convince all oldschool holdouts to upgrade so that 3 could potentially start upselling data packages to them, once they start installing data-hungry apps. Indeed, smartphones had been selling well, but global sales growth is collapsing fast (source)

Ovum analyst Steve Hartley:

“Three is caught in something of no-win situation in the UK,” Hartley writes in a research note. “If this gambit succeeds, then Three will have disrupted the market, but only in as far as forcing the other operators to respond. As [the other operators] are far larger and have far deeper pockets, the likelihood is that Three will come off worst in the long-term. And if it fails, Three can only try something even more desperate to attract customers.” (source)

My reading so far around this ignores the possibility that 3 is getting a cut of Skype (the overall winner, as well as the end-users, in this affair) revenue. This would seem logical to me. It’s worth bearing in mind a recent announcement by eBay (Skype’s parent company) that Skype is going to be IPO’d in the not so distant future.

Assuming this move doesn’t represent the involuntary suicide of an interesting competitor in the already highly uncompetitive UK mobile telco industry, I can only relish the disruption this ought to bring (of course, 3 has been offering its SkypePhone for quite some while now to no success, so let’s hope this new move proves more palatable to the marketplace).

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People are strange from Denis Fongue on Vimeo.

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What a way to start the day.

Here’s a particularly interesting one I just watched, prompting further reading and me seeking to reconnect with an entrepreneur in the electric car industry:

Shai Agassi discusses the economics of mass electric car adoption in a scheme involving removable electric batteries and universal charge points that completely rethinks the economics of running a car. You get paid if you have to change your battery more than x times a year.

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