Tag: politics

P&G growth before and after Gillette ad

Gillette: get woke, go broke? How Gillette’s “woke” advertisement stifled their parent company’s growth

Get woke, go broke? Some have argued that Gillette’s parent company benefited from the Gillette ad, citing the spike in stock value that took place over a week after the ad ran. Others argue that the ad harmed Gillette’s stock and was a net negative.

P&G growth before and after Gillette ad
P&G growth before and after the Gillette “The Best Men Can Be” ad. Yes, I know that I started a couple of the lines on the wrong data point, but the calculations and dates in the text are correct.

Here, we see the truth. Gillette’s parent company, P&G, was growing at a rate of $0.12 in value per day from May 31, 2018 to December 14, 2018. There was a big drop at Christmas (not unusual for a retail company’s value to drop after the busy holiday buying season ends) and there was a correction one month later. The Gillette ad ran near the end of the low period spanning the first three weeks in January.

Zoomed out, it may appear that the ad caused the spike in stock value, but zooming in shows that the entire week after the ad was put out represented a loss in value, NOT a gain. The facts speak for themselves: if the ad had any short-term effect at all, it was a negative effect.

The subsequent spike is also easily explained. Because the ad was controversial and the stock spent a week dropping, bullish investors could see that a correction was overdue from the December drop and took the opportunity to buy while the price was going down so they could ride the stock on its way back up. This kicked off the expected correction.

What is most interesting about the charts (and ignored by those who endorse fact-free “woke” political agendas) is the long-term growth rate. Before the drop and correction, they were gaining value at $0.12 per day, but after the Gillette ad ran (and the expected correction from the December drop was finished), this dropped to $0.10 per day, a loss of 1/6 (16.67%) of the entire company’s growth. P&G is a huge company and Gillette is only one of their many brands; 19 of their brands rake in over $1 billion annually, and Gillette is one of those brands.

1/19 of the company’s biggest brands killed 1/6 of the company’s growth with a single “woke” advertisement. Get woke, go broke, indeed.


This was written up because of a comment by “Old Blanco Rd Productions” on a Coffee Break video about “woke advertising” on YouTube. Notably, this commenter would repeatedly try to pull the conversation back to an advertisement by Nike featuring Colin Kaepernick, an ad which caused some controversy because Colin is the originator of the “take a knee during the national anthem” thing at football games. The same commenter didn’t want to talk about Gillette and P&G and was only interested in Nike and pushing the statement that “Nike added $6 billion in value after the Colin Kaepernick commercial!” Typical bullshit accusations of “sealioning” by a “Spencer Person” ensued, though sealioning is nothing more than a logically fallacious attempt to discredit people who demand that you support your arguments with facts. Quoting from that last link: “In other words, “sealioning” is a gag to be imposed upon people you disagree with if they argue with you for too long, too persistently, or in any fashion that you dislike.” To sum it up, these two people are keen to control the conversation so they don’t lose the argument. If you’ve read everything above, you can see why they’d rather accuse me of illegitimate tactics than to accept the cold, hard, high-low-close facts in the stock charts.

What that last paragraph leads up to is this: I watched both commercials. The Nike ad was only controversial because Colin was in it, but the ad itself is not actually a “woke” ad. It’s a typical Nike ad with a positive message that encourages you to get out there and be successful and stand up for yourself. It’s a well-done advertisement that does exactly what a major brand wants: to connect their brand with positive associations in the mind of the viewer. The Gillette ad, on the other hand, was a negative ad that stereotyped not only the entire male gender, but also visibly drew racial divides, with white males as mindless villainous rapists-in-waiting and black males as the only thing keeping them from raping everybody out here. Its “positive message” was nothing more than sprinkles on a racist, sexist, man-hating, race-baiting turd of a commercial that reinforces the premise that men are pieces of trash by default. The Nike ad worked out well for Nike because it was a good ad with a good message. The Gillette ad disproportionately hampered the growth of a company that has 18 other billion-dollar brands they derive value from because it was designed to press all of the controversial sociopolitical agenda buttons that it could.

PayPal Purge: A Precursor to a United States Social Credit System?

In the video above, I discuss the Patreon Purge, the duopoly overlords Visa and MasterCard that are most likely to be pulling the strings of banks and payment processors like PayPal and Stripe to make finance-based censorship happen, and the logical progression of such behavior being tolerated and unregulated: neo-McCarthyism, discrimination against people for political beliefs and political statements by nearly all professions, culminating in industry-wide shared blacklists that could result in everything from no plumber coming to fix a flooding toilet (because a private corporation doesn’t like your politics) to your sick chemotherapy-racked child not receiving a life-saving cancer treatment and dying (because a private corporation doesn’t like your politics.) It’s not unlike China’s social credit system, except it’s going to be implemented by corporate entities instead of the government.

BUT IT’S A PRIVATE COMPANY BLACKLISTING YOU, NOT THE GOVERNMENT, SO IT’S OKAY!

Elaborating on FIPNA: why it’s needed and why money intermediates shouldn’t have freedom of association

This was written in response to a comment on YouTube from someone who was trying to understand my FIPNA (Financial Provider Neutrality Act) arguments. It’s not a simple problem and I can see why it’s hard for someone to see the whole picture if they’re not familiar with incidents where PayPal and MasterCard have brought down a censorship hammer in the past. I appreciate their questions far more than the other guy that was talking to me who basically spent the entire time recycling the bogus Limbaugh-level nonsense of calling me a socialist and suggesting that what I want is the same thing as holding a gun to his head and forcing him to do work for me. My full wall-of-text diatribe comment follows. I’d be interested in any comments you have on this subject; just know that comments here are moderated as I find time to do so.


What I’m trying to do is find a solution to the problem of financial services banning people in a way that smacks of collusion. It helps to define the problem better first. Patreon banned Sargon and blamed their “global payment network” which could be any of PayPal, Stripe, Visa, or MasterCard. Sargon moved to SubscribeStar which immediately got kicked off of PayPal as a result. PayPal has also banned a lot of people and categories of businesses in the past, and every time they’d blame a payment card network (Visa or MasterCard) and upon contacting the blamed card network, the contacting party would be told that PayPal was responsible, not the card network. This circular blame tactic results in both parties not taking any sort of responsibility…and yet the financial cutoff on the basis of not liking someone’s category of business remains in place.

The thing about financial service providers is that unlike nearly every other category of private business, a financial service provider or colluding group of them can render someone destitute with the stroke of a pen and existing law carves out huge exceptions for banks to harm people without consequences. A story comes to mind where Bank of America had a customer come in with a scam check and asked if it was legit and, if so, could he cash it out. The bank made him wait and called the cops and had him arrested. He ultimately didn’t get any charges filed but he did get to spend some time in jail and have an arrest record, and he couldn’t sue BofA because the law says that they can have people on the premises arrested without consequences.

Ignoring the banks themselves, the ultimate problem seems to be payment card networks, specifically Visa and MasterCard. All ATM cards that are also members of a payment card network in the USA are (as far as I am aware) issued either a Visa or MasterCard card number. This means that Visa/MC form a duopoly, or what is known in capitalism as a “monopoly of two.” Essentially, any duopoly acting in its own self-interest will end up cooperating such that they behave no differently than a monopoly. The competition that forms the basis of a core element of a capitalist economic system (supply and demand) doesn’t start until you have a third player in the market that directly competes with the other two. American Express and Discover are the other two major payment card networks but I have never seen a single ATM card with either of their logos, and frankly I can count the number of Amex and Discover cards I swipe in a year on one hand. They only compete with Visa/MC in the credit card space and they’re quite minor competition by comparison.

Bringing my point full circle, the Visa/MC duopoly control the payment card networks that the entire country has to use to engage in electronic commerce. Even when you individually consider alternatives like using PayPal with a bank draft only, PayPal still needs to maintain their relationship with Visa/MC for every other customer that DOES use a Visa/MC card, be it a bank ATM card or a real credit card, otherwise Visa/MC will threaten to pull their partnership which would decimate PayPal, if not outright destroy it. This means that if a corporate executive at MasterCard (or someone who knows such an exec and has influence over them, i.e. a wife, family member, or close friend) decides that they hate Sargon’s politics or that Sargon rubbed them the wrong way one night when they were browsing through YouTube, that executive can leverage the banhammer power of the entire MasterCard company to force every downstream payment processor and intermediate money handling platform that has any payment processing relationship with MasterCard to refuse to do business with Sargon under threat of losing the ability to process ANY payments through MasterCard OR any other provider that partners with MasterCard, *potentially up to and including entire banks.*

This is the real reason why Stripe, PayPal, and Patreon seem to be colluding even though they may not be: it’s MasterCard pulling their puppet strings and I guarantee you that we have no access to the payment card network blacklist because the payment card networks will have that blacklist under strict non-disclosure agreements with hefty penalties for breach of that section of the contract. Because MasterCard could theoretically bully any kind of financial institution into doing their bidding and taking the public heat for it, my proposed solution is a law that requires all financial service providers to provide their services universally to anyone legally allowed to request them. The devil is always in the details (for example, loans would still require due diligence and be subject to rejection based on reasonable assessments of risk) but the basic premise is that everyone should generally have a right to open a bank account, get a payment card that can be used to engage in commerce online, and freely enjoy the use of that card as a means to send and receive funds between other consenting private parties without concerns over being “cut off” for any reason other than commission of a crime. When the outrage mob shows up and demands that PayPal cut Sargon’s account because he’s “muh alt-right troll insert emotional buzzwords here rah rah,” PayPal can throw their hands up in the air and say “hey, it’s the law, we HAVE to service Sargon no differently than we service you guys, so you’re wasting your time!”

I’m theorizing to some extent because there is a huge information vacuum right now, but based on all available evidence, Visa and/or MasterCard are the puppetmasters and the fight must ultimately be brought to their doorsteps. One last point: the reason I want a Constitutional amendment rather than a normal law is because a normal law will fail on FIrst Amendment grounds, namely the right to freedom of association, but a Constitutional amendment would be able to supersede the First Amendment right to freedom of association specifically for businesses that serve as financial transaction intermediates (anyone between your personal money and another person you’re trying to do business with being able to receive that money.)

RationalWiki universally pushes radical feminist dogma, which isn’t “rational” at all

Don’t get me wrong. I love a lot of the concise, reference-supported articles I find on RationalWiki, especially when it concerns pseudoscience such as the HHO/water-powered car. It’s a handy shortcut to refuting ridiculous things that aren’t scientifically accurate, and nothing makes me feel much more joy than when a bunch of Internet conspiracy theorists are told that they’re wrong and it really rustles their jimmies.

Sadly, rational thought and scientifically backed information dissemination are thrown out the window with a ferocity when you start looking up anything that touches the feminist agenda. Look up “feminism” on RationalWiki and you’ll immediately find weaselly, highly subjective statements that lean squarely in the favor of a radical feminist’s perverted perception of reality.  For example, the section entitled “Academic Criticism” begins the heading “Seeing rape everywhere” with these two sentences: “Feminists have in the past, and continue in the present to emphasize the importance of addressing modern rape culture. Something no one but the most aggressive MRA types think is a bad goal.” For one thing, there is no such thing as “rape culture,” as seen by the fact that I can drive for four hours and not only see no one being raped, but not even be exposed to anything that comes remotely close to mentioning rape….that is, unless we’re re-defining “rape” as feminists are constantly attempting to re-define it, where it effectively becomes “being a male near a female,” at which point the term “rape” would become irrelevant to most people and lose all of its power and importance. The other thing that’s quite ridiculous is the notion that “the most aggressive men’s rights activists think stopping (implied rape) is a bad idea” along with all of the notably absent supporting references attached to it. Hmm…

But wait! Let’s not jump to conclusions based solely on the fact that no substantive criticism of feminism exists in a criticism section of a feminism article on a “rational wiki!” Let’s see if the same treatment is given to articles that cover opposing viewpoints! Aha…we’ll look at the text for misandry, the antonym for the oft-used and heavily abused term “misogyny.” Uh-oh…it doesn’t look good at all, since there’s an entire SECTION of the article entitled “Concise explanation of why the concept is bullshit.” Let’s see what’s under this damning title…oh, here we are: “Sexism, like racism, is an institutional oppression on basis of sex.”

No, sexism isn’t institutional oppression on basis of sex; in fact, there’s nothing “institutional” about it. Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster agree: “sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person’s sex.” I don’t see anything institutional about that definition; do you? “Oh, but you’re ignoring OTHER DEFINITIONS!” the clever feminist might bleat, to which I respond with the other definition: “behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex.” Wait, that doesn’t support “institutional oppression” either, does it? D’awwww, call in the waaambulance because the astute feminist needs to fill out an Internet butthurt report form to squelch the horrible feeling of one’s religion being proven wrong in yet another increment.

brf

I could go on and on ad nauseam discussing why every facet of modern feminism is wrong, but that’s not the point of this post, and other people have said it far better than I have said it. I should also point out that while I’m disappointed at a lack thereof for the “Feminism” article, the “Men’s rights movement” article does make a valiant (and perhaps a little rational in some places) attempt at presenting some points and refuting them. Unfortunately, almost all of those points are misrepresented at least partially, and it’s quite clear that RationalWiki’s articles that involve any gender politics are effectively ruled by a feminist matriarchy; in other words: “no male-positive opinions allowed.”

The bottom line is that RationalWiki is mostly rational on most topics, but they’ve chugged the Feminazi™ Kool-Aid and you simply can’t trust them to be “rational” in any concept that might be “explained” by feminist pseudoscience. RationalWiki people, if you’re reading this, take the time to correct this egregious mistake. I’d rather not have people leaving the so-called “RationalWiki” and saying pure bullshit like this:

Breastfeed.+My+jimmies+are+rustled_f446b9_4909220
If you support gender equality, you’re a feminist. Oh, wait…

“Mothers who breastfeed boy babies need to stop. We need to empower more females in this world and by breastfeeding them we are giving them a good start in life which they deserve over a baby boy [sic] which are already physically stronger than baby girls. I have feminist views and I am not ashamed to admit that. No baby boy will ever be fed from my breasts if I am unfortunate enough to have a son. Formula for him and circumcision to take away sexual pleasure from him when he grows up.”

The Real Reason Tech Culture “Hates Feminism”

I wrote a lengthy comment in response to a Wired Opinion article [EDIT: It appears to have since been deleted; so much for “discussion” eh?] called Donglegate: Why the Tech Community Hates Feminists which has a totally different description in the URL that says “richards-affair-and-misogyny-in-tech” (a description which is a more genuine description of the article.) The article is largely a repetition of radical feminist doctrine which ignores the very simple core of what brought the Adria Richards PyCon disaster about: Adria bullied two men by shaming them in the court of public opinion and then hid under a cloak of feminism and social justice to avoid consequences for her bad behavior. There seems to be a total lack of understanding as to why people in tech culture are vehemently opposed to modern “third-wave” radical feminism working its way into a cubicle or message board near them, and I thought it would be good to shed some light on the subject. Tech culture doesn’t hate women and doesn’t hate traditional feminism in terms of equal opportunity and treatment, but it doesn’t tolerate radical feminism, and that’s where the line is drawn. The comment reads as follows:

The tech community is full of people who don’t like walking on eggshells just because someone is overly sensitive and gets offended at the drop of a hat. Gender has nothing to do with it. This situation would be no different if a white male took the exact same actions. Gender is irrelevant. Tech people generally don’t see the world through -ism colored glasses in the first place. What articles like this (and people like Adria) are trying to do is force us technical types to wear those glasses, and we outright refuse. Everyone is equal in my eyes at first. It’s when they start speaking that the criticisms start to mount, and while techies tend to pull no punches in an argument, we’re used to that style of debate, where it’s all thrown out there immediately with no editing or sugar-coating, we hash it out, find somewhere to agree, and it’s over with.

Adria bypassed this. Instead of saying “I have a problem with that,” she attempted to try them in the court of public opinion. Techies don’t like the court of public opinion because it ignores the merits of the core issues and immediately favors whoever tells the best story or has the most favored reputation. Adria Richards immediately loses on the fundamental problem with the situation. Feminists lose because techies don’t accept their premises in the first place, and knowing that brick walls are devoid of logic and cannot be argued with, instead tell them to toss off.

The truth is that the vast majority of people know modern radical feminist rhetoric and the cleverly crafted jargon that comes with it are, in a word, bullshit. Techies are particularly sensitive to this. Feminism, being a term that is gender-biased and therefore favoring some people over others for factors they cannot (easily) change, is viewed in the tech world as a radical religious belief of sorts, one not to dignify with any meaningful response.

Consider this: anyone who is in tech today and over 25 remembers a time when everyone had a handle or screen name, and you didn’t know if the other person on IRC, AIM, Yahoo chat, etc. was male or female, young or old, white or black, able or handicapped, across the street or across the ocean. We’ve spent a large amount of time talking to people who we only knew by cryptic pseudonyms. We didn’t know nor care about these things. We spent a lot of time in an environment where equality was the default.

The article is telling us, a generation or two that already see everyone as equals, that if we’re men, we’re treating women poorly by default. We call bullshit, because it’s bullshit. When that doesn’t shut down the argument, we ask “so what can I PERSONALLY DO as a solution to this problem?” and we get nothing usable in response. This article pounds out alleged problems in painstaking detail, and yet offers no real solutions that the average programmer in his cubicle can put to use. Until workable, reasonable solutions are offered, all of this radical feminist macroaggression towards the male gender will forever be of no real-world value and fall upon deaf ears.

I would also like to point out that while I disagree with the majority of what the article’s author has written, I have also defended her in at least one comment. Criticism of the article is potentially productive, but criticism (particularly name-calling and other immaturity) of the person just because the article is not in agreement with your opinions is bad for everyone. We all need to learn to respectfully disagree, with an emphasis on respect. Also, someone else’s bad behavior does not justify your own. Try to play nicely with others, and we won’t have so many Donglegates in the future.

Why I’ll never build a home in Chatham County, NC

I have lived in Siler City, NC (in Chatham County, NC) for four years. Having established a solid commercial presence here and finding the area to be generally decent and agreeable to live in, I’ve been seriously looking into the process of establishing a more permanent residence. However, every time I look up more information regarding the process, I see more reasons to avoid Chatham County for establishing any kind of permanent residence. The reasons are many and varied, but I can chalk the biggest one up to one major factor that causes me more concern than any other. What is this major issue that single-handedly doomed my fantasies of building a home on some undeveloped Chatham County land?

Impact fees.

That’s right, impact fees. Something which I’d never once heard of before I came here. I’ve looked at land in Oxford, NC in the past, as well as various other counties north and northwest of Orange County, and not once have I heard of “impact fees.” What’s an “impact fee” supposed to be for, anyway? Apparently, it’s a one-time county government surcharge (read: “TAX”) that’s supposed to raise money for building or maintaining schools. You know, like elementary, middle, and high schools…for the children I shall never ever produce. And boy, these kids I don’t and won’t have would cost me a ton. How much, you ask?

Chatham County’s impact fee is a one-time fee of $3,500.

Needless to say, I’m not keen on buying a $50,000  parcel of empty land to build my future upon if I have to give Chatham County $3,500 for the privilege of building a house there. Despite being a small business owner (or perhaps because of that), I DO NOT make a large amount of money every month–in fact, I’d say I make the equivalent take-home pay of what someone making $8 an hour would make for the 50+ hours a week I work. Fortunately, I have also gone to some trouble to ensure I live reasonably within my means. I’d love to own instead of rent, but let’s put this into perspective: Chatham County tells me that to start building my dream home here, I have to give them about 9 weeks of my pay just for the “impact fee” privilege, ignoring all other fees such as those required for permits and inspections. The purpose of the impact fee being something that I’ll never see any benefit from is merely an added insult. I don’t want to pay for someone else’s children to go to school, and guess what? I’ll look elsewhere because of the hubris of the fools in charge of Chatham County.

I mean, think about this: if I’m buying land for $50,000 and the county demands $3,500 to “allow me” to build a home, that’s 7% of what I’d have paid for the land! That’s not all there is to it, and I could name off other regressive punishment taxation that chases off development such as the “recreation fee,” but my point is clear.

Chatham County: no one wants to move here because you run things like you’re Chapel Hill, Cary, or Raleigh, but you’re none of these. Chatham is rapidly becoming a “bedroom community” and many businesses are shutting down or moving to neighboring counties that don’t have absurdly brain-dead policies like this. I can’t count how many decent-sized corporations have considered Chatham County, NC as a possible location for some kind of sizable facility that would bring hundreds of jobs to the area, only to be denied something they needed. From what I understand, the old Joan Fabrics building in Siler City (which is now occupied by Acme-McCrary, leaving an empty Acme-McCrary building right across the street) was examined for potential as a distribution center for Sheetz, and that deal fell through because someone in some level of local government didn’t want all that tractor-trailer traffic to be there on US 64. Hello, genius, the building has something like 8-10 loading docks on the side! If you want to fill it, is it really reasonable to expect that those docks will be left mostly unused?

In four years, I have witnessed a slow but steady decline in Chatham County’s economy, and while my business is doing well, it’s more because of adaptation and our ability to engineer workflow and customer experience improvements; the county and city governments largely seem to prefer that businesses shut down and get replaced by trees and pastures. On top of that, fees such as impact and recreation fees that charge a premium for the privilege of developing and growing Chatham County end up reducing overall revenues by strongly encouraging people to build their lives in Burlington, Sanford, and Asheboro instead.

Please, for the love of all that’s sane and logical, get rid of these kinds of fees. They hurt everyone in the entire county, and they’re the biggest reason I’ll never build my permanent home here. I don’t want to live in a bedroom community, and when the lease is up on the current location for my business, I’m going to have to justify remaining in Siler City. A forecast of future economic activity will play very heavily into this choice.

How many people are going through the same thought process about this subject every year? How much opportunity for growth has Chatham flipped the bird towards and lost forever? With the constant growth going on in the county, it will only become more difficult to justify over time.