How RIM lost its foothold on the Smartphone. I have to admit, I really didn’t think they would sink this far, this fast. It’s even more surprising than Nokia.
The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America.
They found a purple squirrel in Pennsylvania. the last one they found was in the UK. They plan on releasing it. I’m not sure what else you would do with it, but when it comes to evading predators, I’d imagine it’s hard for a purple squirrel to blend.
Bakadesuyo: We hear a lot about how much we hate our commute. Interestingly enough, men are fine with it. Women are not.
Combating pills-for-perks. We’re getting stiffed. No vacations for us. On the other hand, we’ll never need to buy another pen as long as we live. We could probably avoid buying more coffee cups, too.
A look at fantasy maps.
How can you call a list of the 20 best comic book superhero movies of all time and fail to list the best Batman movie? Did he mean best live-action? He should have said so.
Bloomberg Businessweek argues that Daimler/Smart lost its way in the high-end micro-car market. I would argue that their mistake was that they didn’t go for that market. Their cars were inexpensive. That should be a plus, in my book. But the micro-car became a symbol of status, and that meant it couldn’t be cheap. Also, I’m pretty sure there were some distribution problems. At least in the US.
Controlling parents are more likely to have delinquent children.
Why conservatives love vigilantes and liberals love anti-heroes. {Comment with care.}
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Controlling parents are more likely to have delinquent children.
Um . . .
Okay, first of all, most parents realize upon having their second child that, within the normal middle class range of parenting styles, they have far less influence on their children’s outcomes than the baby books lead them to believe.
Second, the study has the cause-and-effect problem, and I don’t mean that pro forma: parents do, in fact, build their styles around what they have to work with.
I certainly do. Anyone observing my parenting on a bad day might think what I think: “Dang, what a tyrant.” I hate that! But I also know that the instant I relax, my older daughter is off doing something destructive, and probably dragging her little sister along for the ride. Then, after I bear down, she becomes super compliant for a while.
Anyway, the point is that it’s not obvious whether “authoritarian” parenting causes delinquency, or the other way around.
I will add to the cause-and-effect problem the class confounding problem: “authoritative” parenting now has a whiff of upper-middle-classness to it. That’s not a bad thing — certainly I strive for the authoritative style myself — but we should hardly be surprised that upper-middle-class parents obtain positive outcomes for their upper-middle-class children.
No “clever” picture? Putting the number in the title? Is this a new trend or an anomaly?
The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America.
The more time marches on, the more I am convinced that DP Moynihan is the wisest American man to never be President.
I always figured the random titles were equal to a number (‘naturally occurring elements’), which was the ‘series number’ of the Linkluster. Sort of like the transitive property: a=b=c. Trumwill’s a computer guy after all.
And: yeah, I’d expect liberals to like different things than conservatives. Nerds like stories about technology. Sportsy guys like to watch sports. Women usually like romance novels and/or love stories. Makes sense.
Phi,
I could have sworn that I read that they had controlled for income. So one of two things is possible: (1) I read it, but from a different article, or (2) they did not control for income and the results are very highly questionable.
I don’t put as much stock in adaptiveness because by my observational experience most parents don’t seem to adapt.
I would add to those two possible things a third: authoritative parenting is hard. Harder than the other two, anyway. I would think that the aptitude and/or devotion to embark on not simply controlling or shrugging everything off, might be an influencer apart from whatever tactic is employed.
There is a line of thinking – held not just by HBD-types – that what parents do doesn’t really matter all that much, outside the extremes. The fact that permissiveness didn’t seem to have much of an affect would support this theory and would suggest that it’s primarily other factors at play. Hard to say.
Knight, a goof-up on my part. I must have forgotten to eliminate the number and goofed up the HTML on the picture. I’m leaving the title as-is (as I do with the Post #’s), but am adding the picture since I went to the trouble of uploading it in the first place and it pertains directly to one of the links.
SFG, that’s basically the methodology, though my consistency has been imperfect. I thought there was a lot of truth to that last link about vigilantes and anti-heroes. It’s an interesting avenue of exploration, if it doesn’t devolve into “and that’s why my side is better.”
Re: Smart
I suspect that Smart’s problem is the inability of the brand to sell in the US marketplace. Even if they raised the price to match the Mini, they’re still competing with a car that looks somewhat more aggressive, has a historic lineage, and has rear space. Even though the bonus to the car is that it’s relatively small, in the US and Canada, that same market for the car tends to be a bit more aggressive about being car free or will take part in various car sharing schemes, while in Europe, it’s competing against public transportation, cycling, and yes, mopeds. It’s probably ideal in Japan, but they have their own kei cars that they’re loyal toward.
FWIW, one of my co-workers bought one, and openly admits that it’s a slow car, but he loves the polymer skin which prevents denting which is perfect for him since he parks on the street in Queens. Coincidentally, his other car is a BMW X5 which he keeps garaged, so arguably there may be some hope for the market being those looking for a second car, but that’s unlikely given the pricing for this car.
David, to be clear, I don’t think Smart could have just jacked up the price. Then it would just be an expensive cheap car.
I’m not sure I agree about car-sharing or car-free being all that much in the way of competition for the Smart (at least in the US). I think the bigger issue is that the alternative is a still-relatively-fuel-efficient compact. To go with something as small as a Smart, it takes a sort of dedication and loyalty. The model doesn’t inspire that. And so, for a lot of extra space, they can pay a little more, get a lot more space, and still have something relatively fuel-efficient. Or they can pay a little more than a little more, get a Prius, and impress all their friends.
Re: RIM
One could argue that RIM is an example of a company that was stuck in inertia and pretty much presumed that they had a lock on corporate systems, and that consumer purchases were merely an additional bonus to their existing sales. I suspect that it isn’t that different from Lenovo and their ThinkPad line, where their main goal is to sell to business customers, but they’ll willing to sell to non-business types that admire their line and are willing to pay extra and wait the 4 to 8 weeks for one to show up at the door. Had IT resisted the push from their “clients” for their non-RIM phones to work on the system, they wouldn’t be in this mess, but with the corporate garden pierced with iPhones, iPads, and other Android devices, there just isn’t the same level of incentive to stay with RIM except for diehard fans, and the development of Android phones with large screens can emulate some of the keyboard features of RIM phones. Yes, I still see plenty of people using BBM, but it remains to be seen if BBM will remain profitable just servicing a smaller number of business clients.
As for Nokia, IIRC, they just didn’t play well with American operators (especially Verizon), so their phones never sold well here, and nobody wanted to pay for the full cost of their phone like in Europe. So while Nokia did decently in Europe, their share withered on the vine here in North America, and RIM stole what could have been a base of business oriented clients using Symbian based phones. I liked the cheap Nokia phone that I used in Europe, while Symbian was praised for being ahead of its time, it never gained traction here for the reasons I noted above. In a world with no iPhone or Android, it probably makes sense, and if they offered CDMA based phones, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Otherwise, I’d keep using my iPhone or go Android, and now that my phone has global capabilities, there’s even less incentive to buy a cheap Symbian phone for fun. As cheap Androids flood the market, Nokia is only going to see it’s marketshare die, and it remains to be seen if the loyalists will buy Windows Mobile based phones from them, let alone average consumers around the world.
The more time marches on, the more I am convinced that DP Moynihan is the wisest American man to never be President.
Arguably, the only thing differently that we could have done was to allow married couples to collect more in welfare benefit and EITC to encourage marriage among the poor, otherwise, the men of the lower class are unemployable, and marriage has shifted from something that one does to start their life into a capstone for completing one’s life and a sign that one has attained success. If these men are still unsuccessful, and the marriages that they form end up being broken, then there’s little incentive regardless of welfare offered that makes marriage enticing to poor men and women.
Relative car size actually matters quite a bit, and not just in a status sense. In a collision, you don’t want to be the smaller guy; F=ma and all that follows. So the same size car is actually less survivable on an American highway than on a European one because American cars are larger overall.
And the urban market that doesn’t have to worry about that is, well, rather affected by fashion to say the least.
SFG: In a collision, you don’t want to be the smaller guy; F=ma and all that follows.
Actually the relevant equation is P=mv.
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Will, any comments on Moynihan, or do you not know him well enough to say?
Nothing to add about Moynihan. The guy has been pretty thoroughly vindicated by history, it seems to me. Not sure if he’s the wisest to never be president. Our wisest are never our presidents…
David,
I was surprised to read recently that Nokia is coming out with some new Symbian phones.
I agree on your analysis of RIM. Had a conversation a few days ago about it, actually. One of the biggest miscalculations was the failure to recognize that once people got smartphones for themselves, it’d be easier for companies to subsidize private phones rather than pass them out.
Speaking of Moynihan, the man who he said was the smartest in the USA died last week.
RIP James Q Wilson (5/27/31-3/2/12). May your windows never be broken.
Watching the commentary surrounding Wilson has been interesting. A lot of people are arguing that the implementation of his crime ideology had nothing to do with the drop in crime but is responsible for the militarization of the police.
A lot of people are arguing that the implementation of his crime ideology had nothing to do with the drop in crime but is responsible for the militarization of the police.
Yes, Guiliani detractors say the same thing. (i.e. that crime would have gone down anyway)
Crime went down in Colosse, though not nearly to the extent that it did in New York City, in the years of Giuliani’s tenure.