Category: Business

Not Surprising

Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

There’s another one of those (I suspect) A.I. videos talking about the ten guns that are sitting unsold on shelves, and have been almost since their introduction to the market.

There are a couple of obvious losers — the Remington R51 9mm, for example, which was the harbinger of the downfall of the once-great company because it was a shoddy, badly-engineered piece of junk (very much like the company).

The next were those which somehow thought that an expensive 5.7mm bullet was just the thing that the market wanted, and tied that belief to their launch in $900+ guns that were too bulky to carry and too flimsy to be serious rifles.  They were, in essence, expensive range toys, and in the post-Covid years were precisely what the market did not need.

In fact, “expensive range toys” is a pretty good description of most of these ten stinkers.  In saner times, one would have hoped that cooler heads in Marketing would have figured out that mistake;  but there weren’t sane times, anything but.  They were the early Biden-Covid years, when the feral ATF, FBI and Department of Justice looked for any excuse to deny gun owners guns, take away their guns and criminalize gun owners.  And the Covid-era panic buying of toilet paper (FFS) was a perfect companion to the rush to buy guns, any guns, by people who didn’t know anything about guns, where price hikes followed shortage as inevitably as night follows day, where dropping $3,000 on a semi-auto piece of crap seemed an obvious ploy to increase profits, or to plug up a gap in a gun manufacturer’s product portfolio.

Meanwhile, the real gun buyers — guys like most Readers of this website — didn’t fall for any of this nonsense, and spent out money (if we did at all) on proven guns and, while gritting our teeth, insanely-expensive ammo.

Then the waters started to recede, Covid panic ended, and suddenly gun dealers were confronted with a plethora of guns to be sold on consignment, as the panic buyers turned into gun-free zones as before.  Many gun stores which previously had not offered consignment sales now realized that there was money to be made in the commission business as a way of keeping the doors open.

Of course, the idiots who’d purchased awful guns like  like our top ten rascals in the video handed in their geegaws, and now the dealers were left with cluttered shelves full of expensive range toys which nobody wanted.

So when the godless gun-grabbers of the Biden Party lost the White House, the gun market as a whole cooled off, as always happens when the Happy Times return and people are no longer thinking they need to gun up in case of you-know-what.  It happened after Obama was term-limited out of office and conservative voters made sure that Hillary Fucking Clinton didn’t get to play her little Commie reindeer games, and one would have thought that gun manufacturers would have learned their lesson, but of course they didn’t because that has to be the only reason they launched those terrible guns.

It’s funny;  I looked at all the guns on the list, and realized that I, as big a gun lover as exists anywhere in the universe, wouldn’t be interested in any single one of them now, even as a gift let alone at their severely-discounted-but-still-insane prices.

Screw that, and them.

(Read the comments from @reaver6666 in the video’s comments for an excellent overview of the products’ common failings.)

By the way, there’s another A.I. crappy that breathlessly announces that these are the 12 guns you can buy on the cheap.  Yeah, right.

That Paywall Thing

Business, Marketing / Advertising

I received a couple of emails from Readers about my earlier piece on creeping paywalls, and indeed Jamie Wilson at PJMedia wrote a very polite rebuttal thereof.

Like I said in my earlier post, I understand exactly how this all works.

I mean, as someone who has been trying to support himself by writing for the past two decades, I understand completely the need for being paid for one’s work.  I have no issue with that.

The problem I do have is that the cost of paywalls seems to be out of line with the product being offered.  Back when TIME Magazine was actually worth reading, I used to give TIME subs as Christmas- or birthday gifts to friends and family.  I don’t remember the cost, but it was something like $25 per annum — and that for a full magazine on a large number of topics of interest, not just politics, delivered weekly.

Compared to that, most online publications today fall woefully short.  Even Cathy Gyngell’s excellent TCW from the UK doesn’t compare, and sad to say, neither does the PJMedia complex, nor even Breitbart.  Don’t get me wrong:  I enjoy at that conservative stuff, oh yes I do.  But my life isn’t just politics, as even a cursory look at my blog will show, and thus I can find little good reason to spend what seems to be an awful lot of money on what is, after all, a niche interest.

To properly entertain myself, I once worked out that I’d have to spend about $300 a month on subs.  Won’t do it, even if I could afford it.  And when I could afford it, I could certainly afford to spend $90 per annum on Britain’s Country Life magazine, about $100 per annum on various gun magazines, and $30 per annum on pubs like Foreign Interest and Bill Buckley’s National Review (back when it was also worth reading), and so on.  All told, that’s much less than $300… a year.

When today’s online media can resolve the issue with micropayments, I would have no problem paying for Jamie’s or Stephen Green’s articles, as long as they cost me pennies.  Hell, I sell my historical novels (usually, about 100,000 words or so) for a couple of dollars each on Amazon, and each one might have taken me about a full year to write, with all the research involved.  A journalist/writer may charge, say, a dollar a word;  but the publication needs to sell it to a reader for fractions of pennies — something which seems to have escaped our modern publications.

Right now, they don’t.  Yes, a PJMedia sub doesn’t cost that much — but when they start writing content which can rival that of, say, a traditional daily newspaper (like the Daily Telegraph ) in terms of its breadth, I’ll think about it.  Until then, no.

Note, by the way, that Jamie Wilson’s article is accessed through an Internet archive link because when I originally tried to get to it, I was blocked.

Sand In The Shoe

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Technology, Two-Minute Hate

Over here, a couple of guys gripe about ten most irritating things about modern cars.  To save you time, I’ve listed them here, with my thoughts:

  • Beeping — It’s like being locked in your car with a nagging Catholic/Jewish mother:  do this, don’t do that, why haven’t you etc. etc.  Whether it’s seatbelts, lane changing (more of that later) or any one of the many things that someone else thinks that you should/shouldn’t do, I am often tempted just to cut the fucking wires to the speaker.
  • Wireless phone chargers — I haven’t come across this nonsense myself because I last bought a car in 2015, but the guys in the video sum it up perfectly:  it makes your phone hot, and doesn’t perform as advertised unless your phone is perfectly positioned.  It’s all part of making everything bluetoothed instead of cabled.
  • Artificial engine noise — First they soundproof the car, and then because some drivers would actually like to hear the sound the car makes, or want their car to sound all shouty without the necessary engine to make it so, the car pipes in fake engine noise.  If that’s not a good analogy for the A.I./fake/digital/artificial times we live in, I can’t think of a better one.
  • Voice-activated assist — I call this “creeping Alexa”, where one has to rely on some fucking software to recognize your voice (which it often can’t, with comical / disastrous consequences), all instead of you just turning a switch or pushing a button.  And speaking of which:
  • Screen buttons instead of actual switches — There’s no excuse for this, and this has nothing to do with “safety” (the usual excuse) because the plain fact of the matter is that screen switches are cheaper than mechanical switches, and that saves the manufacturer money (which savings are never passed on to the customer, needless to say).  And speaking of safety:  the screen buttons require that one be at the correct screen to enable the things to work;  if not, one has to scroll backwards or forwards until the correct screen puts in an appearance — and all this requires taking one hand off the steering wheel for an extended period, and taking one’s eyes off the road.  Anyone else see a potential problem here?
  • Modern headlights are too bright — I’ve noticed this trend, and it’s fucking dangerous to other drivers, especially in rainy and/or night-time conditions.  You’re not having to land an airliner on a narrow runway;  you’re driving down a street, FFS, with oncoming traffic.  (And if you’re out in the boonies and need brighter lights, add a spotlight bar.)
  • High-gloss finishes (e.g. piano black) — I don’t even like shiny finishes on gun stocks (hello, Browning!), and I see no need for something similar in a car that is basically a dust/fingerprint collector.
  • Subscription services / features — Once again, just another way for auto manufacturers to bleed money out of the customer once the car has been sold.  The nice part of this is that not having some of these features (seat warmers, etc.) has the effect of taking us back to earlier times when we managed perfectly well without all these luxury geegaws.  But I await with bated breath the time when things like windshield wipers, turn signals and high beams all become something you have to pay monthly fees for, instead of them just being part of the (horribly-inflated) sticker price of the car.  And when I say “bated breath”, I mean when the breath becomes “unbated”, that will be a signal to load up the AK.
  • Start/stop buttons — I have ranted about this piece of automotive excrescence more times than I can count.  Yes, I know that you can disable the thing;  but the latest wheeze from these godless fucks is to make it reset every time you switch off the car, which means you have to disable the function as part of the starting procedure every time you want to drive somewhere.   The days of getting in, turning a key and moving on are so far in the distant past that one wonders how the Three Wise Men made it to Bethlehem without satnav — which, by the way, is fast becoming yet another subscription service.
  • Lane assist / traffic distancing — It’s one thing when these functions beep at you as a warning;  it’s another thing altogether when the functions takes over the driving for you.  Apart from the foul nanny philosophy behind the thing, it can also be life-threatening.

Now go and watch the video — especially the last couple of minutes — because those guys are funny where I’m just fucking enraged.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time

Yeah, this one’s going to turn out well for them:

Jaguar’s last ever petrol car came off the assembly line at the brand’s Midlands factory on Friday (19 December) ahead of its daring switch to all-electric vehicles next year.

The final Jaguar model with a combustion engine under its bonnet is an £80,000 high-performance F-Pace SVR SUV finished in black paint, according to the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club, which was in attendance as the Solihull factory officially signed off its last petrol model.

Under the bonnet is a burbling 5.0-litre supercharged V8 petrol engine – a stark contrast to the first ‘new Jaguar’ that will debut next year, which is a near-silent four-door GT that will cost almost twice as much, with a quoted £120,000 to £140,000 starting price.

While parent group JLR made no official announcement of the event, the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club says the final model is being gifted to the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust in Gaydon, where it will be retained as a museum piece.

The club said Friday was a ‘quiet, historic full stop’ for Jaguar’s 90-year relationship with the internal combustion engine.

Yeah, and they’re celebrating this piece of boneheaded idiocy?

No wonder the car, and the staff, are all wearing black:

I think a better payoff line would be:

“Pissing Away 90 Years Of Jaguar Heritage”

Oh, and “full stop” is what’s going to happen to Jaguar’s EV sales, but let’s not spoil the party.

It’s Not Hyperbole

Food & Drink, Marketing / Advertising, Patriotism, Trades

When I first referred to Jeremy Clarkson as “The Greatest Living Englishman”, it started off as a nod to his unflinching honesty when it came to everything he looked at, such as his (non-)review of some Vauxhall car model back in the 1990s:  “If they’re not going to bother to make an interesting car, I’m not going to bother to review it.”

That caused Big Business (in this case, Vauxhall’s then-parent company General Motors) to go apeshit, because that’s not the way car reviewers are supposed to behave.

It’s that same unflinching honesty that he displayed in his first bumbling efforts at farming which turned his Clarkson’s Farm TV show into a runaway smash hit, and along the way almost single-handedly changed the way the British regard both food and the farmers who produce it.

So when he turned that same agricultural ignorance towards brewing beer — simply because he had a barn full of unsold barley which he needed to sell — one might think that it was just another celebrity using their name to sell a product.

In this case, one would be not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.  And if you want to see a case study in marketing that, in hindsight, never had a chance of failing, then I implore you to watch this video.

Time and time again, “the experts” believed that Clarkson was making a mistake, and every single time he proved them not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

He turned a few thousand pounds’ worth of unsold barley into a £75 million company, and in the process, changed the way British people think about farming, about beer and about the people who farm and the people who brew beer.

And he did it all with his usual unflinching honesty and openness, which gave the lie to the usual corporate veneer of respectability and care for both their employees and their customers.

Which is why he truly is the Greatest Living Englishman.

I can’t wait to try it the next time I go over to Britishland.