Category: The Dish

When you were born has a huge impact on your politics:

A new model of presidential voting suggests President Obama’s approval rating — currently in the low 40s — will inform not only the 2016 election, but also the election in 2076. The model, by researchers at Catalist, the Democratic data firm, and Columbia University, uses hundreds of thousands of survey responses and new statistical software to estimate how people’s preferences change at different stages of their lives.

The model assumes generations of voters choose their team, Democrats or Republicans, based on their cumulative life experience — a “running tally” of events. By using Gallup’s presidential approval rating as a proxy for those events, Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist, and Andrew Gelman, a political scientist and statistician at Columbia University, were able to estimate when political preferences are formed.

Leonhardt wonders whether today’s impressionable youngsters will skew conservative:

Some political analysts believe that teenagers are already showing less allegiance to the Democratic Party than Americans in their 20s, based on recent polling data. My own sense is that their argument rests on small, noisy sample sizes, and Mr. Taylor, of Pew, is also skeptical. The larger point, however, remains: The Democrats face challenges with today’s teenagers that they did not face with today’s 25- or 30-year-olds.

By any measure, Mr. Obama’s second term lacks the political drama of his first, when Democrats were passing sweeping legislation and the Tea Party sprang up in reaction. But the generational nature of politics means that the second Obama term still has enormous political import.

Dreher reflects on how his politics have shifted over time:

For me, the ages of 14 to 24 corresponded to the years 1981 to 1991 — the Reagan/Bush years. It was during that time that the feel-bad 1970s were dispelled (the first significant political memory I have was the Iran hostage crisis), and the Cold War concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The liberalism of that era was thoroughly ossified and reactionary. John Paul II was at the height of his influence, and that did a lot to bring me into the Catholic Church.

What shattered my faith in my 1980s conservative worldview were three things that happened in the 2000s: the Catholic sex abuse scandal, the Iraq War, and the financial collapse. These things happened from 2002 – 2008, a period that takes in ages 35 to 41. The connecting thread of these three events is how they all destroyed my belief that the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party could be trusted to exercise sound judgment — on moral matters for the Church, and on social, economic, and foreign policy matters for the GOP — and strong leadership.

Washington state’s legal weed looks like it will fetch a premium, at least in the short-term:

[Hillary] Bricken [an attorney working with Washington marijuana businesses] expects the product that will be available — most likely on Wednesday at most locations, if not later — will be fairly expensive. From what she’s heard, recreational marijuana will likely sell for about $3,000 a pound. In comparison, marijuana on the medical side sells for at most $1,300 a pound.

“Those numbers haven’t been seen in Seattle for five years,” Bricken explains. “I think smart producer-processors are going to gouge away to meet that demand.”

Sullum fears the steep prices will drive people back into the black market:

Until the [Washington State Liquor Control Board (LCB)] develops rules for edibles this fall, Washington’s stores will be selling buds only, and they won’t have much to sell. The LCB started licensing growers in March. So far, according to a list it posted today, it has granted just 86 applications, with more than 2,500 others still pending. In addition to the shortage of legal growers, high taxes and and regulatory costs are pushing prices up.

Although customers lined up today for the novelty of buying legal pot, the new shops probably will have a hard time competing with dispensaries and black-market dealers. “My old supplier just texted me,” Deborah Greene, Cannabis City’s first buyer, told The Seattle Times. “[He] said, ‘I saw you on TV. Now I know why you’re not calling me.'” She may have been joking, but a lot will hinge on whether that sort of anecdote sounds plausible a year from now.

Why Dominic Holden is more than happy to fork over the extra cash:

I bought a bag of marijuana today at Cannabis City, Seattle’s first legal retail pot store, just after they opened at noon. (Surprisingly for a pot store, they opened on time.) It was a different experience from every other time I’ve bought pot—and I’ve bought a lot of pot before—not just because there were dozens of TV crews swarming outside. What legalization provides, prohibition never could: explicit certainty about what I purchased, what it contains, what it doesn’t contain, where it came from, where the money goes, and the promise that every time I purchase this product it will be essentially the same.

Ezra wants us to stop referring to “moderate” voters, whom he calls a statistical mistake:

What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they’re left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they’re labeled as moderate.

But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream.

“A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British,” says Broockman. “A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process. You’ll often see really draconian measures towards gays and lesbians get 16 to 20 percent support. These people look like moderates but they’re actually quite extreme.”

The result is that voters who hold gentle opinions that are all on the left or the right end up looking a lot more extreme than voters who hold intense opinions that fall all over the political spectrum. … “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want,” Broockman says. “Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want — that’s what we tend to call moderate — versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want.”

Roberto A. Ferdman is unsurprised that cupcake company Crumbs is closing up shop:

Cupcakes are a fad, not a food staple. The cupcake bubble, after all, was exactly that: a bubble. And bubbles—even cupcake bubbles (paywall)—burst. The market called this one back in 2011.

Bill Saporito has seen this all before:

Crumbs joins the long list of once hot food franchises that couldn’t resist the smell of growth and ultimately had difficulty managing it: David’s Cookies, Krispy Kreme, Einstein Bagels, World Coffee, just to name a few. They can survive, but generally after massive restructuring. Crumbs ran out of time and money. The pattern is similar: a good product or idea becomes increasingly popular, and investors get moon-eyed about the prospects. At the same time, other operators and investors will swear to you that there’s plenty of room for more than one brand—or that if there isn’t much room, their concept is superior.

Daniel Gross predicted this years ago:

Trends often inspire counter-trends. And the latest hot trend in dessert has proven to be something of a backlash to cupcakes. The cupcake bubble has been replaced, as I documented last year, by a fro-yo bubble. Tart instead of sweet, light instead of heavy, low-cal instead of fattening, fro-yo is in many ways the ying to the cupcake’s yang.

But John Aziz believes there “was never a cupcake bubble”:

[C]upcake sales have declined a little — falling 6 percent in 2012, flat in 2013, and falling 1 percent so far this year, according to NPD — but that is nothing like a bursting bubble. That’s a gentle, gradual decline that’s reflective of consumer tastes that have gradually changed, a marketplace that has become crowded, and snacks like the cronut and wonut that have begun to eclipse the cupcake. … Companies like Crumbs who botch their expansion plans, leaving themselves stuck with high levels of debt, tend to fail in whatever industry they are in. That’s not a bubble bursting — that’s business.

Jessica Grose finds all the cupcake hated a “little sexist”:

Mary Elizabeth Williams defends the humble cupcake:

Crumbs didn’t fail because people have stopped loving cupcakes. Put out a tray of cupcakes – Hostess, homemade, you name it – at a partytoday and see how long it lasts. Crumbs failed because the novelty has worn off — and because the product itself simply couldn’t sustain consumer loyalty after it had. But as long as there are mouths, people are going to love cupcakes. It’s cake you can carry around; figure it out. Victory will always belong to cake, even when all that’s left of Crumbs is, well, you know.

David Sax is of the same mind:

After nearly two decades as the reigning dessert trend in America, and increasingly the world, the cupcake will not go away. It will be there at birthdays, graduations and office parties. It will still elicit palpitations of excitement on sight, even from those who cursed its constant attention, because fundamentally the cupcake’s enduring strength is its very essence: a cake you can hold in your hand and eat without a fork. A cake you can eat in the car. America’s perfect cake.

Alice Robb delves into the linguistics of emoticons and emojis:

At the forefront of the research into emoji use today is Stanford-trained linguist Tyler Schnoebelen. By analyzing emoticon use on Twitter, Schnoebelen has found that use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class—just like dialects or regional accents.  Friend groups fall into the habit of using certain emoticons, just as they develop their own slang. “You start using new emoticons, just like you start using different words, when you move outside your usual social circles,” said Schnoebelen.

He discovered a divide, for instance, between people who include a hyphen to represent a nose in smiley faces— :-) — and people who use the shorter version without the hyphen. “The nose is associated with conventionality,” said Schnoebelen. People using a nose also tend to “spell words out completely. They use fewer abbreviations.” Twitter notoriously obscures demographic data, but according to Schnoebelen, “People who use no noses tend to be tweeting more about Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber. They have younger interests, younger concerns, whether or not they’re younger.”

In a primer on how to use emoticons more intelligently, Roni Jacobson stresses the gender stereotypes involved in smileys and frownies:

Multiple studies over the past 15 years have shown that women use emoticons more than men. Women also smile more in real life, perhaps because they are expected to be the more expressive gender, says Susan Herring, a linguist at Indiana University who studies online communication. In a 2009 analysis of messages featured on a texting-based Italian dating show, she and her colleagues argued that men and women used their texts to project different identities. The women who sent in their messages seemed to be “performing a kind of socially desirable femininity” characterized by “playfulness” and “fun,” while the men acted more serious.

“There’s this new norm that women are expected to show more happiness and excitement than men do,” said Herring. “If you’re a woman, you may have to realize that if you don’t use a smiley face sometimes, you may be misinterpreted as being in a bad mood or unhappy with the person you’re talking to. I don’t think that’s true for men.”