ads without products

You don’t say… Any guesses on the unmodern economic theory that informed said sociology of the past?

Sisphyus just pointed out this NYT review/article of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms in the comments to a previous post.

Here’s where it really gets frightening:

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could
have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some
passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation.
“Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial
Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern
economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the
modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or
rationality.”

Boy is that ever a heavily thudding "our" in the last sentence. You have to love it, really, and the way that it echoes the hard science cum totally asswild speculation stuff that cropped up everywhere toward the end of the nineteenth century. Thermodynamics and entropy, therefore heat death (well sure, a long, long way off), therefore a universe and its maker that agree on one point: economic equality leads to dissolute catastrophe. At least via this article, and of course we should wait for the book, it doesn’t sound like there’s going to be much to back up the genetic turn aside from a hunch and some handwaving in the genome-decoded direction.

A genetic predisposition to low interest rates, huh? Then again, maybe he’s on to something.

So yuck, yes. But I’m actually more upset at the Times than Clark himself, for an ideosyncractic reason. They have, their information design department anyway, taken Neurath’s Isotype in vain.

You can click through to see a big version of the infographic, but do you see those little guys in the middle, the second graph? Not cool - this is exactly the opposite sort of argument than the one they were, ahem, born to serve.

(more…)

I was just thinking about this series of photos, which I saw in Le Monde when I was in France, but couldn’t find on-line for saving, and lo and behold here they are via kottke.

Powered by ScribeFire.

(more…)

I’ve loved this ad - even though it was for an energy company - for quite a long time. Always seemed to me to be potentially open for repurposing and.. I really love modularity, just in general. (We see an English version here, of course…)

But lo and behold, the other day when I thought to go to youtube to check if it was available for me to suck down into my archive, I found this:

(more…)

I am so lucky that exactly three weeks from today, I am going to be in Amsterdam, just a short train ride away from this. (If I need you to, would you be willing to write my wife to explain exactly why it is so absolutely necessary for us to pack up the kiddo and leave gorgeous Amsterdam - where we’ll only be as of now for two full days - to head to Den Haag?)

I learned of it via an excellent article today on metamute by Marina Vishmidt, which gets quite a lot succinctly right about Neurath:

Although the classical logitical positivist statement remains Wittgenstein’s ‘the world is everything which is the case’ , the Vienna Circle was not always confined to the ideological quietism that could be deduced from that statement. Neurath’s work combined pragmatism with a utopian orientation, a drive to represent ‘things as they are’ in the hope that revolutionary progress would make out of them things of the past. The Marxist ethics behind the ISOTYPE project complemented the kinds of formal innovations – images built of numbers, standard templates, seriality – that structure the internet, another vision of universal information, albeit one without a clear ideological mission. The disambiguation of social contradictions as a premise for a materialist design practice is one of the questions that After Neurath: Like Sailors on the Open Sea tries to address in the format of an exhibition but also of a year and a half-long programme of research, symposia, and smaller exhibitions. The allure and shortcomings of a universal grammar is another, with the connotation that it is both a dream of reason and a bold proposition for engineering social change.

UPDATE: Oh for christ’s sake. The exhibition is off - ended in April. Whatever. Glad I figured this out before I got on the train to Den Haag….

(more…)

Another brilliant post at Sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy one that happens to be indirectly apropos of so much that I’ve been saying on here. Go read it. Here’s the start:

Perhaps the most irksome element of ideology as currently practised is the belief that in the face of climate change the individual can make a difference. Hence the moronic plaint of various charities in sundry adverts that by not overfilling the kettle, or by not leaving your telly on standby, you can help avert the holocaust that rising temperatures will cause in the global south. What this serves to occlude is that the only measure that could really avert this is massive cutbacks in private cars, Rationing and some form of Central Planning: by curbing the individual, in other words.

(This lovely poster I’ve brought over… Interesting to think about the way that the relationship between the photo-hands and the abstract infographic image actually enacts the relationship between the individual and the state under planning….)

(more…)

I’m guessing that just about everyone is getting a full dose of this new brand of spam designed to slip through the nets - random prose plus a hot penny stock tip in the form of an image…

Annoying, yes. Very, of course. And rumor has it that there’ll be no way to stop it, it’ll just get worse and worse until we abandon email altogether and start penning letters to each other again, the old fashioned way.

But I have to admit, I’m starting to get interested in the dummy text that they clip / is auto-clipped into the messages. Fragments shored against the ruin of our banally benighted period, they perform the Really Short Signification (RSS) that informs, perhaps, our collective trajectory.

The rate of employment growth is slowing as business confidence appears to be undermined by rising oil prices.

Oil prices have been on a roll this year.
Having excess cash is a good problem for companies to have: It can lead to higher dividends, larger share buybacks, and accretive acquisitions.
The Mad Cow disease scare, obesity issues, and management health have drawn attention instead. The ability and investing style of the portfolio manager are at least just as important as fees. However, these investors typically seek to own mutual funds within a single family such as Fidelity Investments for purposes of administrative ease.
Investing in the Best No Load Index Mutual Funds. What does this mean for biotech investors? ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY YARD CARE - three easy things you can do this year to take care of your yard in a responsible and eco-friendly way during the fall and winter.
What Oracle and Siebel do with their cash remains to be seen.
Whether you prefer to index or take an active approach to managing your investments, ensuring that your mutual fund is putting your interests first is good investing practice. Past performance is not a guarantee for future results.
The rate of employment growth is slowing as business confidence appears to be undermined by rising oil prices.
Remember Time Warner?
AlphaProfit Investments, LLC disclaims any liability for any direct or incidental loss incurred by applying any of the information in this report. Valuation metrics now are less attractive than they were in prior months. Then it was the unrest in Venezuela and Nigeria.
The Mad Cow disease scare, obesity issues, and management health have drawn attention instead.
The Root Cause: Transportation Relies on Foreign Oil. How are these grades determined? Mutual funds get kudos if their independent directors invest in the mutual funds.

Unfortunately, I already chucked it out of my inbox, but a great one came the other day with a subject line that went something like “But the new spam is sent as an image and computer security experts are struggling to cope with it,” which suggests, but does not prove, that there is a certain degree of non-mechanical authorship going on here…

(more…)