As IF Times

link More than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage: survey | Reuters.

Seems that everything is done by polls these days, especially when it comes to election time.  Everyone wants to slice off a bit of demographic to imply significance from some bit of esoterica.  The standard technique is to isolate some segment of society and then make conclusions about their preferences as it pertains to the larger group.   This kind of segmentation has a lot to do with the messages being conveyed by the various political groups who would pander to whomever is likely to give the most votes.

An Internet search fails to find even an estimate of the number of polling firms operating in the U.S., but we are all familiar with the big name ones: Gallup, Rasmussen, etc.  There are also the newspaper  related polls such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters to name a few.  Suffice to say though, if you want an opinion about something, someone will provide it for a fee.

The ubiquity of polling has created a political environment in which factions are pitted against each other in order to secure votes, which of course encourages polling to measure the temperature of any identified demographic, which brings us into a vicious cycle.  If you are catering to left handed people, the right handed people get disenfranchised and resentment between the two factions will escalate.   When people bemoan the polarization of the political process, this is ground zero of the cause.   Instead of saying anything substantive, politicians will employ strategies to rope in the desired demo as articulated by poll results.

The particular sample in the link above purports to show the proclivities of 26 million people via a sample of 1760.  The conclusion is that more than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage.  I don’t know about you, but I think that this is not only a leap of logic, it’s a 3 day train ride of logic based on a sample of 1760 Latinos.  I would treat this conclusion with as much skepticism as if a sample of college men in San Francisco implied that 60% of college guys everywhere harbored homo-erotic fantasies involving Brad Pitt.   Angelina maybe.  To imply that all persons of an ethnic slice are likely to hold homogeneous opinions is naive at best, racist at worst.  I’m not convinced that all Chinese, all Germans or all Italians can be pegged by a sample of 1760 of them.

The real danger here is that in today’s attention deficit society, nobody reads the body of the polls.  They read the headline and ka-bing, it’s now a fact.  This is reminiscent of the early days of television advertising when marketers could say pretty much anything they wanted.  It was not uncommon to hear that “4 out of 5 doctors preferred Parliament cigarettes” or that “4 out of 5 Dentists choose Crest”.  Bottom line is, polling is as much marketing as science.  My poll of 5 people confirms this.

link For Datsun revival, Nissan gambles on $3,000 model – Yahoo! Autos.

It’s only in hindsight that people can determine at what point in history that a trend change occurred.  It can be put forth that things such as the invention of the Gutenberg movable type printing press in 1450 ushered in a new era of enlightenment for mankind.  It can be argued that the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in about 1775 was responsible for the industrial revolution which gave rise to modern industry and commerce.  It can also be argued that the first law degree ever conferred on someone in about the 12th century will be responsible for the downfall of civilization.  Incidently, according to Wikipedia, that was created aptly by the European University of Bologna.  Of course that’s debatable.  Some blame rap music.

I would postulate that the invention of consumer credit, especially via credit cards is mainly responsible for much of the aggravation that many people in modern western society face today.  Combine that with the slickest advertising industry in history and it’s a devastating cocktail of unfettered consumerism.  Think about the consumer items that most everyone spends money on today; phones and automobiles.  As documented in  http://asiftimes.com/2009/12/30/can-you-hear-me-now/   phones have been around for about 140 years.  When they first appeared, they were useful appliances.  Now, they are essential lifestyle items no less important than clothing or food.   People find it necessary to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone as well as possibly hundreds of dollars on monthly usage charges… just to LOL other people.

In the case of automobiles, the siren song of faster, more luxurious, more prestigious, more comfortable, yada, yada, yada never fails to pull in that next generation of willing consumers who are convinced that they must have the new iteration.  Nissan looks to try to change the whole dynamic in the car arms race by apparently introducing a new stripped down vehicle which goes the other way.  No 12-way power electric leather seats with built in warming and cooling.  No 12 speaker surround sound stereo.  Navigation will mean looking out the window and a backup camera will mean turning your head.  Power steering will be by as much strength as you can muster and rolling down a window will mean an arm cardio workout rather than a finger press.  Assuming windows are available for the purchase price.   Three thousand bucks doesn’t even cover the cost of leather seats on most average sedans these days, so it wouldn’t be a surprise that the new Nissan may have only one window that rolls down.

While the car won’t be available for sale in the U.S., it’s probably going to be a hit in most other parts of the world where having a bicycle means you are middle class.  But that’s too bad.  If people in the western societies can afford to pay off their main form of transportation with just a couple of paycheques, imagine the resultant collapse in consumer debt.  Who really needs napa leather seats to pick up groceries anyway? Who needs 12 way power seats when it’s mostly the same person driving all the time?  How did people manage to get around years ago with only one or two horsepower (by real horses) and now we need 400 to get to work?  Maybe the new Datsun can be an inflection point in unchecked consumerism.  Now about those $500 phones for the kids….