Friday, October 25, 2019

What Do Weddings and College Football Have in Common?

Besides not going together as in: do not schedule your wedding in conflict with an OU football game and expect me to attend (the wedding).

Weddings, sporting events, and so much more are all subject to alternatives for the audience. And that competition is demanding that average is over.

Consider weddings first. They have to be getting more and more expensive and outlandish just to keep up--not just with each other but with the opportunity costs for the guests. The explicit cost of attending a wedding is time, travel, and gift. Since there is no admission fee to reduce, the only way a wedding can become more attractive is along the quality dimension (differentiation). In the extreme think about trying to get people to attend a Manhattan wedding. Of course it would have to be fabulous! The opportunity cost for guests would simply be too high to allow otherwise.

Now consider sporting events. They face opportunity costs from far substitutes (other leisure and non-leisure activities) and near substitutes (watching the game at home or a friend's house on a giant high-definition TV with no traffic, weather, cheaper food and drink, etc.). Sporting events do have admission fees which means these competitive forces are at work making college football et al. choose a strategy of differentiation (high quality, value-added experiences for select audiences) or low price (mass market to fill enormous venues). Over the long-term the latter strategy probably is suboptimal if not outright unfeasible given competitive pressures and expense demands. It might all become various first-class seating only at the highest levels of various sports.

Thinking back to weddings, people don't need the superficial opportunity to stay in touch that weddings once offered. Social media now provides this. With sports feeling like you are there and a part of it can be closely simulated through viewing on TV, interacting with others via social media or texting, and all the other media/internet follow up.

This goes a long way to explaining the wedding-industrial complex I pondered previously.

Like A Boss: Universal Rules For Looking The Part


Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler may understand this... 

Borrowing heavily from my memory of an article I believe I read in Fortune ("acting like a CEO" or something) about 15+ years ago. You can take this as advice, observation, criticism, or any way you like. I am not singling anyone out in particular, but if the shoe fits...
  1. Laughter is poor form. Shows a lack of control. At best smirk with a "hmph", which could be mistaken for a throat clear. If a slight chortle escapes, shake your head as if to deny the appropriateness of it. Any accidental laughter should leave witnesses unsure if you thought it humorous or thought it humorous that one would think it to be humorous. Never, NEVER giggle.
  2. Avoid any hint of sarcasm and give no indication of any appreciation or even perception for it. 
  3. Refrain from eating sweets in front of others. Act as if to show the slightest attraction to a dessert is to yield to all childish pleasures and reveal a total lack of control. 
  4. Your enthusiasm is just matter-of-fact support for those things self-evidently worthy of praise. You are a charter member of Team Winners. If "they" fail to succeed, it is simply due to some lack of confidence they shamefully did not possess--a concern you had all along. 
  5. In circumstances when normal humans are overcome with visible worry or anxiousness, you are overcome with calm. Emotions are for the weak. You are a stoic. 
  6. If asked to give a solution to a hypothetical problem, instead of a direct answer just reflect poignantly on how you would build a process for avoiding such dilemmas from the start. If asked to give advice, challenge the presumptions behind the question. Never waste an opportunity to obfuscate and go meta.
  7. Never bring your own copies of materials to a meeting. If it is important enough for you to need it, it is important enough that someone will provide it. 
  8. Play dumb if you can use that to your advantage to put an adversary or underling on edge. 

An Idea Ahead of Its Time Is a Bad Idea


Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) simply way ahead of her time

If someone came back from the future to tell us that in her time (our future) fossil fuels had been successfully banned (first nationally and then worldwide), this would have to be taken as exceptionally good news. 

At the same time if we were to implement a first national and then worldwide ban on fossil fuels today, it would be colossally bad news.  

It is overwhelmingly likely that a ban on fossil fuels sometime in the future can only happen in a remarkably wealthy world. Ironically it will be built on the back of the use of fossil fuels that we will be wealthy enough to eventually ban them.

Religious leaders like AOC don't understand the subtle yet critical difference between our legitimate aspirations and our binding realities.

Politicians follow rather than lead. Perhaps we should be grateful for this when it holds true.