Tag: Stupid people

Of Course They Are

Mocking Furriners

Let’s hear it for European Wokism:

More than 90 per cent of severely ill coronavirus patients in Germany have a ‘migrant background’, a leading doctor has said, prompting claims that the government is turning a blind eye to the issue to avoid igniting a race row.
…
‘There are parallel societies in our country. You can only put that right with proper outreach work in the mosques, but we’re not getting through. And that sucks,’ he said.

Guess those niqabs aren’t helping them much, huh?

Which leads to another interesting question:  Are face condoms worthless?

In related news, Texas will lose all the stupid Chinkvirus restrictions next Monday.  If I weren’t staying in a hotel, I’d be building a bonfire for all those stupid and, as it turns out, useless masks…

Oh Noes

Food & Drink, Nannies, Science!

More from the world of dietary science:

Regular meat-eaters are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions than those who shun or ration animal products, a study from the University of Oxford has found.
The research found a meat-lover who eats 70 grams of meat — processed or unprocessed — more than a peer is at 15 per cent higher risk of heart disease, 30 per cent more likely to get diabetes and almost a third (31 per cent) more likely to develop pneumonia in the future.

I did the work so you don’t have to:  70 grams is about 2.5 oz…

Whatever.  According to this lot, I should have died about 15 years ago, given that my daily breakfast contains inter alia  a large piece of boerewors.

And yet, here we are.

Innumeracy

Numbers & Statistics

Oh FFS.  This simple question has apparently caused all sorts of mayhem among the innumerate:

The answer is of course “FALSE” — and to think otherwise is to be ignorant of two of the simplest definitions in mathematics, i.e.

  • “A right angle is defined as two straight lines meeting at a 90-degree angle”, and
  • “There are no straight lines in the circumference of a circle.”

And in the above picture, there’s only one straight line.

That anyone can even be fooled by the question means that math education has been completely screwed up.  I agree that it’s quite a tough question for a seven-year-old child (as posed in the article), but nobody with more than a seventh-grade education should be stumped by it, let alone a professor of mathematics.

By the way, ignore the red herring that a straight line consists of two right angles:  that’s only a partial definition of straight line.  (“The shortest linear distance between two points” contains only implied angles, not actual ones.)

And by the way:  the correct spelling is “two right angles”, no hyphen necessary.

I need another gin.

Update:  Oh FFS-squared.

For the above diagram to contain two right angles, one would have to add a third radius, thus:

Now the question “There are two right angles” has the answer “True”  (A0C, B0C).  If you were to answer “False”, giving “because there are four right angles” as your reasoning, you would (rightly) be given an “Incorrect” because there are only four right angles in the imaginary world (i.e. Thales’ Theorem et al.).  However, we are not in an imaginary world because we are not talking concepts, we are talking about an actual diagram.  And to cap it all, we are talking about a question posed to a seven-year-old child, for whom Thales has no existence.

As I explained to a Reader in an email on this very topic, it always pays to remember that mathematics has little basis in reality, e.g. where a line can have direction but no thickness and a point has a position but no size.  And I’m not even going to touch on division by zero… [eyecross]

Screwing Up The Brand (2)

Marketing / Advertising

Following on from yesterday’s post about Stella Artois peeing in their own soup comes yet another example of marketing silliness:

Country star Luke Combs has apologized for appearing with Confederate flags, saying he is now aware of how painful that flag is.

Ummm Luke, bubba:  the Confederate flag may be painful to some, but it is not painful to your audience.

And just so we’re clear on the concept:  that “audience” would be the folks who buy your albums, attend your concerts and wear your T-shirts;  and in a pure head count they probably outnumber the flag-hating weenies by 25,000 : 1.

Now I don’t know if continuing to display the Stars and Bars at your concerts would disenchant folks in the crowd — just in passing, I bet your next concert will reveal an absolute sea of Confederate flags in the audience — but I’m pretty sure that a whole bunch of your fans are going to be mightily pissed off that you took a knee towards the Politically-Correct Set.

And the problem with doing that is that these woke bastards are never satisfied, especially after you do it once.  Expect your lyrics to come under scrutiny from now on:  references to cheating women will be labeled “gender-hatred”, singing about booze will be considered as encouraging alcoholism, and forget your pickup truck, that gas-guzzling ozone-destroying monster.

And if a country singer can’t sing about love, booze and trucks, there’s fuck-all left for him to sing about.

Oh, and a postscript:  just wait till the vegans see this pic…

I should also point out that until I wrote this post, I’d never heard of Luke Combs.

Fracture Lines

Gummint, Mocking Furriners

Looks like the Euros are having a problem or two:

The French blame the Germans and the Germans blame the French.  The Eastern Europeans blame the Western Europeans.  The Southern Europeans blame the North.  And everyone blames the officials in Belgium.

As Douglas Murray adds:  “In other words, business as usual.”

Once again, we see proof (if any were needed) that massive bureaucracies don’t respond well to a crisis.  In this case, the Euros thought that they could get both research and supplies of Chinkvirus vaccines from the UK, but when the Brits told them to shove it — all hail Brexit! — the Euros were left holding the short end of the stick, and squabbling ensued.

The lesson is well learned Over Here, for all those who think that Big Gummint is the answer to our woes.  In a crisis, it seldom is.

 

Screwing Up The Brand

Marketing / Advertising

One of the things that drives historians (well, this historian anyway) crazy is that people just refuse to learn from history — no matter how much precedent there is for a situation where doing X results in Unpleasant Consequence Y, we just go ahead and do X anyway, expecting that the outcome won’t be total shit and that anyway, Times Are Different.

Example:  when Coca-Cola tried to change Coke into New Coke back in the mid-1980s — because The Market Has Changed, And We Need To Move With The Times — a storm of furious resistance from their loyal consumers forced them to recant and relaunch Coke as Classic Coke, going back to the same old formulation of super-sweet battery acid that the world had come to know and love.  (New Coke, eventually, went the way of its erstwhile spokesman Bill Cosby.)

The Coca-Cola fiasco should be taught in business schools everywhere, and should be an integral part of any company’s training in marketing.  It’s not the first time it happened, of course;  but it was one of the more illuminating examples of leaving your established brand alone, and all the more notable because it involved a mere carbonated soft drink, surely one of the most irrelevant and disposable products ever invented.

Clearly, the Coke fiasco has either been forgotten or willfully ignored, because:

Stella Artois owners Budweiser Brewing Group UK&I say they’ve lowered the alcohol content in its canned, draft and gluten-free versions to capitalise on the popularity of “wellness trends”.
It last cut ABV from 5% to 4.8% in 2012 citing “evolving” drinking trends in the UK.

Let’s not forget the role of the bean-counters:

But the move is said to have saved previous brewers AB inBev up to £8.6million a year in duty, according to alcoholpolicy.net.

And the result?

The latest reduction has left beer lovers fuming and sparked a surge in one star reviews across supermarket websites from customers.
…
In a scathing review on Tesco’s website, the person wrote: “Today I cracked open a can of Stella 4.6% and thought I had Covid, since I could not taste anything.”

I have no dog in this fight:  Stella Artois has always been my supporting argument when I state that contrary to popular belief, the Belgians know fuck-all about making a decent beer*.

It appears that they know fuck-all about marketing the foul stuff, either.

*As I recall, the Belgies were the first to start adding fruit flavors to their beer, which just proves my point.