Since dudes apparently scoff at diet drinks, the folks behind the new Dr. Pepper Ten soda decided they needed to really butch up their advertising in order to reach the core soda-drinking demographic, which just happens to be teenage boys. The result? An over-the-top, ironically hypermasculine ad campaign touting the new drink as “NOT FOR WOMEN.”
Here’s one of the ads:
Oh, and they’ve also got a Facebook app that’s — get this! — only available to men! I’m not sure the women of the world are going to suffer much from being banned from playing a rudimentary flash game that involves shooting “girly things.”
I know they’re hoping to generate controversy here, but really? This is just too dumb to even get annoyed about, much less angry. It’s not misogynistic; it’s more a parody of misogyny. Is it such a parody – stereotyping guys as macho buffoons — that it’s actually more misandrist than misogynist? You could make an argument for that, but again the ad is so over the top ridiculous, so soaked in irony, it seems silly to get indignant about this either.
So what’s going to happen when the MRAs of the world hear about this ad? Will they, missing the irony, embrace its Diet Soda Going Its Own Way (DSGIOW) mentality? Or will they denounce it as an example of ad world misandry and pretend to be deeply offended?
I’m betting on the latter. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
JohnnyBB: If he’s a poe, he’s dedicated. He’s been doing it for years, and in lots of fora.
@Pecunium, You forgot;
3: What’s the current inflation rate in the US
4: Explain the use of a finite resource in an expanding population.
5: Define “Inherent Value”
6: (Essay Question) Explore the roots of the Silver crisis of 1465
(I swear, Scotland right now is hooking up generators on Adam Smith’s grave to power all of northern Europe)
@Pecunium: The issue isn’t so much adopting the gold standard. But to find ways to stop the fed from printing vast amounts of dollars, hence devaluing every dollar that is currently in circulation.
In relation to gold, that can be solved by pegging the dollar to gold and requiring congress to approve of any re-pegging. Obviously each dollar isn’t going to be worth one troy ounce of gold, but we can re-peg it to something like 500 dollars per troy ounce. Then congress can pass legislation to re-peg it up or down depending on the economy. (which is how it should be as opposed to the Fed controlling the money supply.)
Since money is nothing more than a store of value, anything that is considered valuable can possibly replace it. The only thing that keeps the dollar at it’s current value is the “full faith and credit” of the US government and the output of our economy. A intangible perception, while gold is very much tangible.
As you can see, our economy isn’t doing well, the government is debt-ridden and we aren’t producing as much (plus our trade imbalances don’t help). This causes the dollar to lower in value even more after inflation since the “full faith and credit” of the US is waning.
The gap between gold and a growing economy is similar to the gap between our floating money circulation and the amount of wealth of the US. The wealth of the US is much higher than the actual money that is floating. In fact, unless you want to kill the economy, you can’t have more dollars floating that are worth more than the wealth of a country.
Also, the massive war effort during World War II was the major cause to the US and other countries getting out of the Great Depression. Factories were re-opened and people were hired to manufacture all the needed clothes, bullets, ships, rifles, etc… that were needed for the war.
Lovely, isn’t she? A sort of cool dignity. She’s the model for Boccaccio’s “Three Graces;” truefax.
She would have eaten DKM alive and spit out the gristle.
Come out and say it. You know you want to. Say it and get banned, asshole. I know how you think, and I know what you think.
Weirdly, I still think he’s better for the world than NWOSlave.
In relation to gold, that can be solved by pegging the dollar to gold and requiring congress to approve of any re-pegging.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re suggesting that we make our economy dependent on another act of Congress?
Amphitrite, you might want to check the forum–we talk about more serious issues there.
It’s true that the trolls that come here are sometimes depressing, but the tagline does say “Misogyny. I mock it.” Having a lightly modded comment section just gives us more targets. We’re less activists and more blowing off steam–as someone on here put it once, “I get mad that ‘Someone on the Internet is wrong!’ when I read other sites, then come here and discover that someone intelligent has already told off the Internet for me”.
In a roundabout way, the free-for-all style has also improved my debate skills. You learn to move fast when the shit starts flying.
@Katz: If the state controls the money supply, one would assume they would actually control it…as opposed to the private bank known as the Fed controlling it. Otherwise we need to de-couple money from the state and have alternative private currencies.
I understand, but anyone who’s followed our debt-ceiling politics at all would be anathema to the idea of a Congressional vote to do something that the economy might require.
Brandon, inflation isn’t especially high right now.
CB, it’s my understanding that inflation tends to be higher when the economy is strong and lower when the economy is weak, no?
wheewhoo-
I drank lemonade with my Tijuana hot dogs tonight….
uh, if anyone is gonna make a pee and weiner joke, well I wouldn’t expect less…..
I can’t believe I missed this. DKM wrote, “I don’t know, probably for the same reason that I assume that water is usually wet at room temperature…”
Does water become dry if the temperature rises above or below 75? 😛
I was gonna read Brandon’s wall of text, but I got distracted by his repeated use of the word “pegging.” Thanks, other thread. :p
hehe pegging heh
@Katz: What affects inflation the most is when the Fed opens the “discount window” by increasing the amount of money in circulation. When more money is pushed into the economy (good or bad) the effects of supply and demand take hold. With more supply and the same demand, the price (or in the dollars case, value) decreases.
When the Fed closes the “discount window” and lowers the amount of money in circulation, there is less money in people’s hands hence the value of the dollar goes up since there is less money being chased by the same amount (roughly) of people.
So when Bush and Obama decided to throw more than a trillion dollars “extra” into the system, it is only a matter of time before inflation hits. The only way to “fix” this is to 1) never print and distribute massive amounts of money and 2) closing the “discount window” and removing the money from circulation.
You know the IBV and Inflation Fairies have been claiming that inflation is going to hit, ANY DAY NOW, and it still persists in not happening.
Maybe, just maybe, there is more going on then the idea that printing money=inflation instantly?
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
I asked CB for a reason.
Oh my god, you fucking gold bug. Me and pecunium destroyed this bullshit the first time you posted and you’re still at it? Fuck you, you randroid piece of shit. Go wank to Atlas Shrugged again, it’d be a better use of your time than asking for an antiquated, idiotic system be reinstated.
Jesus fuck, for all your “OH MY GOLD IS SO SPECIAL AND THE PRICE IS FIXED” BS you still haven’t even responded to “Tell that to Spain Circa 1525”.
Low offiicial currency systems with bank issued notes is not the best system. It causes boom and bust and internal strife between people in different economic fields. Bank collapses would happen, essentially wiping out the value of large parts of currency overnight. The response of the northern courts was to force those who endorsed bank notes to still owe the value, which meant that the person who originally obtained the banknotes, and anyone who endorsed them, risked loosing assets based on bank collapses, but prevented total economic collapse through encouraging refusal of all notes. The south, which preferred to barter property titles (often property titles to human beings), hated these rulings. This was a contributing factor to the civil war, and the root cause of a large amount of pre-civil war economic troubles.
History, you might want to learn a bit of it.
Brandon, so much oversimplification (which is really, not surprising, since, “We need a commodity based standard” is a reductionist explanation of how economies work).
Also, the massive war effort during World War II was the major cause to the US and other countries getting out of the Great Depression. Factories were re-opened and people were hired to manufacture all the needed clothes, bullets, ships, rifles, etc… that were needed for the war.
Not so much.
What ended the Great Depression in the United States? This paper suggests that the recovery was driven by a shift in expectations. This shift was triggered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) policy actions. On the monetary policy side, Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and announced an explicit policy objective of inflating the price level to pre-Depression levels. On the fiscal policy side, Roosevelt expanded real and deficit spending which helped make his policy objective credible. The key to the recovery was the successful management of expectations about future policy.
(Great Expectations and the End of the Depression By Gauti B. Eggertsson American Economic Review 2008, 98:4, 1476–1516)
That last bit is important. It’s consumer attitudes which influence spending (at all levels, from the individual getting more than staples to make it through the week, to industry building new plants, and hiring new workers. If no one is buying, no one will spend).
The actual factor which the early escaping economies had was a “floating currency” (i.e. they were not on a gold standard. The answer to the second trivia question, what did the USSR and Switzerland have in common; they were both on a gold standard).
What Roosevelt did was unpeg the dollar from gold and increase spending, with the idea of 1: increasing spending, which would increase demand. The net effect of this was a return to a pre-1929 level of economy by 1937 (well before any form of war spending could be used to account for the increase). At which point the idea of, “fiscal austerity” was trumpeted as if a balanced budget were needful to make things work.
The economy immediately contracted, and the “double dip depression” was born.
As to the idea of inflation being bad, always and everywhere, the rate of inflation through the war was higher than you probably imagine. 1942 had an annual inflation rate of almost 11 percent. It wasn’t just the war, as 1947 was 14.4. and 1948 was 8.1.
Brandon: @Katz: What affects inflation the most is when the Fed opens the “discount window” by increasing the amount of money in circulation. When more money is pushed into the economy (good or bad) the effects of supply and demand take hold. With more supply and the same demand, the price (or in the dollars case, value) decreases.
: The overall rate of inflation for 2009 was -0.4 percent. For 2010 it was 2010 percent. 2011 looks to be ending the year at somewhere between 2-3 percent.
So how does that work again?
Brandon: Let’s take a look at the math of your “gold standard”. At 500 per oz, the profits alone, for the second quarter of 2011 require a lot of gold.
How much? Per the US Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Economic Analysis the Profits from current production (corporate profits with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments) increased $61.2 billion in the second quarter.
That increase would, at 500 dollars per oz require 122,400,000,000 troy oz (or 7,650,000,000 lbs troy) to cover. That’s not the total profits, that’s the increase in profits, for one quarter; in an economy which is not working anywhere near it’s full capacity.
Whatever commodity you peg a currency to has to deal with that sort of problem.
Yes, inflation usually accompanies economic growth. As problems go, inflation, within limits, is a fairly happy one for an ecomony to have. Even in the “stagflation” era of the late 70s, the Fed was able to intervene by raising interest rates to about 18%. The problem with goldbugs is that they imagine inflation to be the Worst. Thing. Evar. In fact, deflation is a much bigger concern, since it is harder to reverse through central bank intervention.
Inflation, again within limits, tends to benefit wage earners and debtors, as wages tend to rise and debts become less relative to prices. Inflation tends to hurt creditors and investors, which is why it’s such a bogeyman to our elite classes.