That makes sense. There are other drugs people think that are a 9/10 or 10/10 in harm that they avoid even if they know that the drug produces pleasurable affects. Something like heroin comes to mind (though I don’t know about that drug really).
The only other thing that comes to mind is that something like alcohol seems so ingrained into American culture (and many other cultures) compared to some known really bad stuff like heroin that I have a hard time thinking people would care. Hmm. Then again smoking was ingrained into the culture very heavily at one time, no? I assume with all the bad stuff about smoking coming out people slowly changed their minds on it regardless of the culture.
They all became happy while sharing their memories—but they were quiet when Dr Rapaille asked them about their thoughts on coffee.
Japanese had no association with coffee.
He commenced with children as the target audience. Nestle started making coffee-flavoured candies to woe the Japanese children. This experiment was a long-term strategy to attract Japanese consumers because Nestle wanted to introduce the flavour of coffee to children at a young age, which would later lead to capturing their attention as adults. Psychologically, we all remember glimpses of our childhood memories of enjoying toffees and hammock rides. Similarly, these children would miss the taste of coffee candies, ultimately opening the doors for Nestle products to enter the market on demand. This strategy is called the imprinting strategy.
Now they do.
Dr. Rapaille illustrated the influence of emotions in business. He triggered the human behavioural aspects to implement his plan. The trick is simple! Keep researching and seeking out opportunities instead of forfeiting.
Try to always surround yourself with positive peers because the energy from them will help you face the challenges with courage.
They talk about this as if its a good thing. Then again I don’t see whats explicitly (if anything) bad here.
I guess? I think because tobacco is bad if they did the same thing with tobacco then it would be bad. I do think coffee is bad and therefore what they are doing is bad. To clarify: I’m having issue seeing whats necessarily wrong with the method. The product they are selling is bad, but the method seems ok to me. Not great. Since it seems kind of manipulative, but idk. If they did something similar with a product that was actually good I don’t think I would care. Though maybe they wouldn’t have to? But then again coffee is seen as a good product to many people.
No they wouldn’t. I think this is something I could see Jim Taggart or Orren Boyle doing. That is not the sort of thing they do.
Hmm. In my head I’m imaging some seemingly decent businessman who has a good product that does this. Something like onions. I think those are more or less a good product. He runs a good onion company and wants to expand. The place they are trying to expand to is somewhere where onions aren’t part of the diet and they do the above tactic. I don’t know. Doesn’t seem bad to me. Its just onions.
I don’t think those characters that I consider great would do this kind of thing.
Coffee is a bad product. It’s not like onions. (At least coffee is bad for consuming a lot regularly like Nestle wants. I have no strong opinion about consuming small amounts sometimes.)
I think if Dagny were selling onions, and they weren’t already popular enough, she would come up with some advertising tactics that work significantly better for good products than for bad products. She’d use a strategy where having a good productive is an important advantage. The tactics Nestle used can work for good or bad products. Tactics like that are dangerous.
Also, I don’t think which food products were already popular was just luck. Onions have been a valuable part of the human diet for a very long time, while mass produced coffee hasn’t been. Making large changes to people’s diets is dangerous if you don’t know a lot about nutrition and health (which we don’t). Just because new technology enables big diet changes doesn’t make that safe.
I do agree that if Dagny were selling onions she would come up with tactics that were better for good products than bad products.
So is the issue with Nestles strategy the fact that it can work both good and bad products? Or is there another issue with tactic itself?
Hmm. Do you have anything to make of the tobacco stuff in Atlas Shrugged? Actually. Hmm. This is what I was thinking: I/we think coffee is a bad product. Its probably suppressed that its a bad product, but I think too many its a good product. Do you think that the reason coffee failed in Japan was because its a bad product/they thought it was a bad product? I mean coffee is successful in many other places. I don’t know/doubt if the same tactics were used in the initial expansion of coffee. *
*I’m not asking you to research this for me. I’m just asking for your general thoughts on the matter. I looked up some stuff related to the spread of coffee and found this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gs4o77/how_did_asia_specifically_the_east_iie_china/ . The stuff seemed quite dense. I may read it more throughly later cause it seems interesting but it seems Japan has had some prior coffee history. Also I did ctrl + f and did nestle and nothing came up.
It being not just luck makes sense. Aren’t onions (and most vegetables) today mass produced? Hmm. Onions have been produced for 5000 years it seems according to this: Onion History - National Onion Association :
Most researchers agree the onion has been cultivated for 5000 years or more.
It’s suspicious how indirect Nestle’s tactic was. They couldn’t just directly persuade their target customers that the product was good and valuable for them. They did something more indirect and sneaky.
It’s also suspicious how Nestle targeted children after failing with adults. Adults tend to know more about critical thinking and have more strategies for resisting propaganda. Adults can also be more set in their ways and resistant to change, so targeting children can be legitimate, but it merits some concern/consideration. Note that if one were trying to rationally spread new ideas to young people who were open minded, I think it’d be more typical to target teens and young adults, not little kids.
Looks like Rand had some beliefs about smoking that were normal in society at the time but mistaken. They weren’t essential to the book.
A more important underlying error, that contributed to her view on smoking, may have been inadequate skepticism about the potential dangers of new technologies.
Paul Crider just published an article in The Bulwark arguing that Trump and his minions resemble Ayn Rand’s villains more than her heroes.
Rand instilled in her followers a need for hero worship, and she gave them the impression these heroes were plentiful at the commanding heights of the economy, despite slotting many of her villains in these same lofty positions. She thus left her disciples unprepared for a world in which so many of the world’s wealthiest capitalists used the “aristocracy of pull” to amass their wealth, and sought that wealth not as a byproduct of their creative energies but as a means to dominate others. Being seenas dominant is just as important—that whooshing sound you hear is the black hole of Elon Musk’s self-esteem, sucking in its surroundings. And Rand failed to equip her followers to grapple with racism not from the underbelly of society but from its highest echelons.
I appreciated your post, particularly that part.
I came to a similar realization myself a few years ago which might interest you:
My essay argues that the rule of law is a prerequisite for free markets, and today illegal actions by businesses are so widespread (particularly fraud) that to move towards capitalism we need to improve policing of businesses (which are mostly run by villains). Shrinking government to try to move towards minarchy, without getting businesses to respect property rights and follow the non-aggression principle, won’t actually get us capitalism nor anything resembling it, just aggressor companies running even more wild than they already are. I think the almost total emphasis on shrinking government while viewing companies too positively, without much discussion of improving and making more effective the legitimate parts of government that would exist under minarchy, is a huge error by the Objectivist and libertarian movements. More emphasis on how tons of corporate behavior violates the rules of the free market and is incompatible with (classical) liberalism would also allow us to find more common ground with the anti-capitalist leftists who complain about big companies and are often correct that there is some sort of problem (even if they don’t understand the nature of the problem and suggest the wrong solution).
Insurance companies are investment banks. They make most of their money by investing their money. It’s better for insurance companies to keep the money they have longer because they can invest it longer and they can make more money on the money they have. If they have to give up that money. They can’t make as much in their investments.
Bifurcating trials splitting into two trials
twice as long for the insurance companies. They get to hold their money for longer.
Clearer Trial Procedures (“Bifurcated Trials”): The legislation allows trials to be split into phases: first to determine liability, and then to assess damages. This ensures a fair process where both sides can present their arguments without confusion or bias.
I don’t know/get how splitting the two helps. I do think Tort law has some issues with cost and stuff but I don’t see how that helps. Regardless, kinda crappy that, if true, insurance companies are pushing for this so they can do stuff with your money.
Having a really hostile, adversarial relationship with one’s employees is a serious problem that needs solving regardless of which side(s) are in the wrong.
This contradicts the basic pro-capitalist narrative I learned about the industrial revolution and the poor working conditions of the past. It makes the business owners sound cruel and kinda evil, not doing their best to be economically efficient in a less wealthy society with workers who can’t afford and don’t want to pay for all types of workplace safety that workers today have.
Based on the minimal fact checking of searching it on Wikipedia, some of the main claims appear to be true. Phossy jaw - Wikipedia
Trump administtation pardoned BitMex for violating an anti-laundering law.
A number of companies including J.P. Morgan, Lloyds, UBS, Barclays, and AIG have either a DPA or NPA. They’re a kind of agreement that like get rid of the charges of their crime. I think with DPA courts are involved and NPA they’re not.
P.S. It’s hard to remember the details while focusing on the topic.
Idk if this is a lot or not just cause while I can believe that Trump is more pro-corruption or whatever I would be surprised to believe that the other presidents/administrations were better considering the volume of stuff corporations have gotten away with in the years.
The pardon for the crypto exchange (~2:00) reminds of the stuff Coffeezilla covers. He’s sold merch before with the phrase “Crime is legal”. I wonder if he noticed an increase in crypto scams (among other bad stuff in the financial sector) when Trump took office.
Hmm. Ok so around ~2:20 he mentions that while with Trump the time has been “ripe” it wasn’t exactly much worse before. Its apparently always been a pretty good environment for corruption. Democrat or Republican.
A thought around when he starts mentioning deferred prosecution agreements (~3:35): I think its kinda odd that the government has choice and leniency in dealing with crimes and stuff. Idk. Like one purpose I can think of is that their may be a lot of crime and you choose to deal with important ones. Or if you hear about a crime done for “good” reasons like stealing when hungry (i havent heard stories of prosecutors doing this but i think they can do something like this) and you let them go. But idk it feels like an arbitrary power. Especially as he mentions that these DPAs are everywhere. It feels like a power that can be used more for harm than good. Like how Rand has mentioned certain government powers are just inherently corrupt. But idk.
(~5:00) So DPAs started off as something I think is ok, being intended for “first-time and juvenile non-violent offenders”.
(~7:00) About the Anderson Story: I don’t know if he covers it later but I do think it kinda sucks to hold everyone in the company guilty (Idk if they did do that exactly but it sounds like something they approximately did). I can believe certain people in a big company were just doing their jobs and didn’t know about any of the bad stuff. Like I can imagine working at a manager from my Starbucks and hearing my boss say something like “Shred X documents”. I’m like ok. Idk if the proper thing would be for a manager (or anyone) to start questioning it so they don’t get held liable for the company.
(~11:50) Thats really really sad and messed up that this lady ended up pleading guilty to negligent homicide even though GM messed up and knew it messed up.
(~17:10) I hear this a lot with fines. That the fine is manageable for a company so its meaningless. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing but I wonder what a good alternative would be. A higher fine? A fine close to bankruptcy but not there? But then goes back to some of the previous issue of it may hurt the whole business who has “innocent” employees.
(~24:00) He mentions that some things we can do in the future are make fines more harsh and actually prosecuting people. He acknowledged, earlier, that this is not just a Trump thing. I wish more attention was given to why these bad things are happening, instead of that they are happening.
How so? From memory, I thought a lot of people just lost their jobs because the company went out of business. That’s totally different than holding those people legally guilty.
If a fine doesn’t deter the behavior and is far too small to make the victims whole, then that seems like a problem.
It’s generally leadership and owners who are the main problem. If a fine bankrupts them, someone else could potentially buy the company and keep the rest of the employees. They don’t necessarily have to lose their jobs. But if you work for bad people and they go out of business through stupidity or crime, and you have to find a new job, that seems fine. It doesn’t make much sense to me to want to protect employees against that. Whenever you get a job you know there are risks and you might need a new job later. You had no reasonable expectation of total job security. There are always lots of other people who are out of work for bad reasons or bad luck who don’t get special help. The people who lose their jobs do get some help and protection like government unemployment benefits (money).
That’s a hard topic. Talking about what’s happening is a good start which helps enable further analysis about why.
There are a wide variety of potential research angles. Like you could look at confusions about capitalism and the unpopularity and ignorance of classical liberalism and Mises. Or you could try to blame capitalism and property rights. Or you could look at power, elites, social hierarchies, nepotism, favors, and favoritism. Or you could try to connect it to colonialism and white culture look at how other cultures are or were different. Or analysis could focus on laws and judges. Or you could look at limited transparency and debate, and the lack of debate policies, letting politicians and CEOs avoid accountability. Or you could look at induction, indecisive arguments and disrespect for fallibilism as root causes leading to irrationality and errors.
I think the part that bothered me here, that I forgot to clarify, was that around ~7:00 he mentions that by having Anderson convicted of a felony the employees could lose their license. That was the part that bothered me the most. Your bosses did something wrong, and maybe many of your coworkers did something wrong, but it would suck for the maybe few/maybe many people who didn’t know and worked their to get screwed over because of that.
I think this would be a hard question to answer, but how should corporations (or any other kind of organizations) be punished? Especially the bigger they get. The smaller the group the more I understand punishing all of them (but even then) as its more likely they all are in on some criminal plan, but as the company gets bigger and bigger people in different areas know less and less.
Also the video mentions that even though they were on the downfall the belief by some business and government people was that the prosecution against Anderson is what sealed the deal. On a related note to that: I wonder what can be done about false prosecution stuff. Not claiming this was false prosecution (though I have heard about issues with the Enron case, I’m not knowledgeable enough too comment on those), but its similar in regards to how people, when put up for prosecution, are seen in a bad light. That bad light can have rippling consequences even if you are proven innocent/not guilty. That sucks. I think this is more of a cultural issue then a legal issue though.
afaik do fines usually go to making victim whole? i think most fines just go to the governments black hole. i think damages go to making victims whole. From google’s gemini:
Fines are penalties, often fixed or capped amounts, paid to the state for criminal or minor offenses to punish the offender and deter others. Damages are monetary compensation awarded in civil cases to an injured party to cover losses they suffered due to someone else’s wrongful act or breach of contract. While fines are punitive, damages are meant to make the victim “whole” again, and can include compensatory damages for actual losses and, in some cases, punitive damages to punish egregious behavior.
Hmm. That makes sense. Bosses making stupid decisions and you lose your job is fine to me. In one sense, a crime is a particular kind of stupid action they did to the company.
I agree. Its just there’s a lot of bad things in the world. Maybe I’m becoming numb (thats not good I think), but hearing another bad thing in the world feels pointless to me. Why things are this bad seem more important and interesting, but I understand that can be hard. Plus there are people who I disagree with (though I guess not with much of an education/understanding backing it up) who do try and explain some of the bad stuff we see. From conspiracy theories to socialists.
From memory, I thought he said the company could lose its license, not individual employees. And employees need a licensed employer for this type of work.
