Would You Buy A Used Racing Team From These People?

Two of Formula 1's eleven teams have run out of money.  Marussia appears to be finished.  And Caterham is trying to raise money through crowdfunding. 

This story has been reported in the media as a reckoning for the sport, in which they will realize that the finances are unsustainable, and it will have to be remade.  Racing suffers from the same success-begets-success problem that a lot of sports face, in which good teams have greater income, which allow them to outbid other teams for top talent.  Auto racing has it worse for a couple of big reasons: one is that money doesn't just buy talent, it buys technology.  And there's the fact that no one has any reason to love the lesser teams:  In team sports, a bad team can at least count on at least some fans from their home town to support them even when they are uncompetitive. That's why I doubt the Caterham funding plea will work; sadly, there probably aren't many people around the world that will care.

Sports is a bizarro world where Americans are socialist and Europeans are unapologetic capitalists.  So NASCAR and IndyCar have low-cost, balanced series, while Formula 1 does little to keep lesser teams alive, never mind competitive.  So not only do winning teams win the big prize money and get the biggest sponsorship dollars, they also get the bigger share of the TV money.  So it's inevitable that lesser teams will get caught in a vicious circle.  Some people have suggested that the solution is to let the unsuccessful teams go under, and just have the rich and successful teams field more cars each.  But that won't work either, since the problem will just reappear: Even if there are fewer teams with more cars, someone has to finish last, and no one will want to sponsor them.

So eventually the sport will have to completely overhaul how it works.  But that will mean a radical shift in philosophy, as they drop the pretense that the sport is some ultimate technological competition at the bleeding-edge of engineering.  Instead, they'll have to tighten the rules to make the cars virtually the same, and sell it as a competitive sport.

But they won't be doing that any time soon.  In a world with many emerging markets, there is a constant supply of rich people and corporations looking for instant credibility and status.  Essentially, that's the case with Russian-owned Marussia, (formerly) Malaysian-owned Caterham, and the next candidate for bankruptcy, Force India. So expect all these teams to be back next year, under new names and ownership.

Undecided Voters Need Their Head Examined

You may have seen a recent article about researchers predicting if a person is liberal or conservative based on their reaction to "disturbing" (i.e. gross) images.  Despite what you're likely thinking, it's not that one side was more disturbed by the images than the other; actually, people's reaction to the images (and even their description of their reaction to them) didn't predict a person's ideology.  Instead, it was a scan of brain activity while the person looked at the pictures.  The different areas of the brain that were activated could be used to predict a person's political views with 95% accuracy.

There are a lot of interesting and controversial aspects to the story, but what I find interesting is the high accuracy of the scan.  It would seem to surpass other tests to predict a person's ideology, such as: annual income or church attendance.  More interestingly, it would likely be better than the test of simply asking the person what their ideology is. 

I, like most politically aware people, are constantly amazed at how many undecided people there are.  I can understand people being torn between two similar options they've narrowed it down to.  But there are always people who go into the election seriously claiming that they have no idea which of the diverse candidates they favour.  So those people have no idea what their political ideology is, but according to this paper, a brain scan could tell them.

Like An Annoying Neighbour

Often, companies will use a common character or concept in their ads. Like Wendy's with that red-haired woman who seems to have a different circle of friends every week. I'm sure that people in the ad business have a name for it.

Anyway, usually a brand will only have one of those ad motifs at a time. Wendy's, for instance, used to have Dave Thomas, and before that they had the Where's The Beef lady. But you wouldn't try to have two ad styles going at once, unless you are trying to cover up the fact that you have an insane number of ads.

Which brings me to insurance. All the big American insurance companies run two campaigns.

• GEICO: the English gecko, "Everyone knows that."
• Progressive: Flo, that anthropomorphic box
• Allstate: the President from 24, Mayhem

So why would insurance require so many ways to advertise? I know insurance is one of those businesses that is "sold, not bought" but still, that's a suspicious amount of effort put into selling something.  Usually if people use so many cutesy gimmicks in advertising, it's either breakfast cereal, or they're trying to distract you from something.

At this point, I was going to rant about how bad the Esurance ads are.  But they are so misguided that I thought first I should google, "esurance 'half that time' 'is that a joke'".  I think the ads are serious - taking on GEICO's "15 minutes could save you 15%" ads, by promising to take half the time, but not saying how much money they save you.  But I came across another blog that has already disembowelled the ad campaign, so I won't bother.

Great Post, Now I'll Set My Computer On Fire

Of course, I realize people are stupid.  But even given that, I have trouble understanding violence following sports championships.  After the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, two people were shot, two stabbed, 40 arrested, and lots of cars and businesses vandalized.

First of all, let's review the circumstances:

• It's baseball, the least violent major sport.
• It's San Francisco, a wealthy, educated, tolerant city.
• It's their third championship in the past five years.

So if ever a victory was going to result in a big shrug from the winning city, this would be it.  And yet we still saw violence.  On top of that, it's now so expected that if barely even made the news.

The violence-following-championships has gotten so predictable that it's likely a self-fulfilling prophecy now.  If everyone knows that identity-concealing chaos is about to erupt, people will be more likely to act without civility.  A riot is more likely to start if everyone believes a riot is about to start.

Here in Canada, we don't usually riot following one of our teams winning it all.  At least, I don't think we do, it's been so long I don't remember.  But we do trash a city when we lose.  That at least makes some kind of sense, destroying things in anger rather than celebration. But it was, in a way, more embarrassing.  It's one thing to explain to the world that one of your cities burst into violence because of complex psychosocial dynamics.  But we had to explain that one of our cities exploded into violence because we really do get that frustrated over hockey.

Meet The New Champs, Same As The Old Champs

It's a sentiment you often hear when sports journalists talk about the future prospects of traditionally strong teams like the Yankees or Cowboys: (insert sport) is better when (famous, traditionally strong team) is good. Or sometimes they go as far as saying (insert league) needs a strong (famous team). But I've got to ask, is that really true?

The evidence doesn't seem to bear it out. As noted earlier, baseball has faced declining popularity, in spite of nearly twenty years of continuous success for the Yankees. The NFL is doing well despite a long spell of mediocrity for the Cowboys. Hockey's minuscule American popularity is harder to gauge, but here in Canada it's as popular as ever, despite a generation of underwhelming play by the Canadiens and two generations of terrible play by the Leafs. As for the NBA, they experienced just about the biggest boost in popularity any league has ever experienced during the Jordan era, and that was on the back of a team that had little previous success, during which traditionally strong teams like the Celtics and Lakers were unremarkable.

I think the reason for this misguided belief in the need for strong classic teams is that it comes from journalists who are trying to tell stories that put today's events in a larger perspective. Fans and players, on the other hand, live in the moment, so they don't care. A great example was the recent "big three" Miami Heat. When three top players decided to team up to win championships, they didn't have a problem with doing it playing for a team younger than them. And fans didn't need any encouragement to love them or hate them for it, even if the team they are cheering for or against is one their parents or grandparents wouldn't recognize.

Conspicuous Consumption

I live alone, can get to a number of grocery stores easily, and I don't like to plan. This means that I make a large number of small shopping trips, rather than a big weekly trip like most people. The point is that I often shop at irregular intervals, where I buy odd combinations of things I happen to be running out of.

I became conscious of this a few years ago when I got to the checkout and realised that I was buying pickles and ice cream. No, I wasn't pregnant, nor was anyone in my household, I just happened to need those two things.

That purchase seemed to tell an implied story about me, one so economical Ernest Hemingway would be proud of it.  Even if it wasn't really true. So now I often wonder about what people might assume about my purchases. For instance, at the bulk store, I often purchase spaghetti and semi-sweet chocolate. I feel I should reassure them that I won't be having them together.

All this came to mind recently when I made another potentially suspicious purchase.  I'd like to reassure everyone that I just happened to be running low on toilet paper the week before Halloween.  That's the only reason I was buying it.

How Recklessly The Pages Are Filled

I often use CNN's web page.  No, I don't look for news there.  But if I'm having problems with my internet connection, I often use it as a reliable page to load to see if it's working.  Yes, I could use Google, but I often use it, so I can never be sure if it actually downloaded, or if my computer has just reloaded it from it's own memory. 

But today when my connection was being particularly difficult, I loaded CNN, and then realized that I did have one piece of news that I wanted to see: the score of tonight's World Series game.  That's one simple piece of information that lots of people will be looking for, so surely it will be easy to find.  I search through the boxes of headlines in different topics before I find the sports box.  And here's what I find:

Does it have the score? No.  It tells me that I can get a live blog of a couple of sports events that are now over.  It gives me headlines which, when severed from their article, don't mean anything.  It tells me about the PGA president and the Rays' manager, stories that have already been out for 24 hours.  And just to rub it in, it tells me the result of a Spanish soccer match, in a way that most Americans probably wouldn't have understood.  But this is how news gets presented on the Internet in ad-funded sites: an array of fragmentary headlines draw you to click further in to find the info you want. 

I wish postings on the internet could have useful, descriptive headings.  Anyway, thanks for letting me rant, I think that's enough for this post.  Now to think of an obscure song lyric pun to use as the title.