Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 20-02-2015

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 20-02-2015

Feb 20, 2015 12:00

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Comments 21

andrewducker February 20 2015, 12:03:34 UTC

I'm aware that most explanations of the SuperFish security clusterfuck are over people's heads. If anyone wants a much more basic explantion then I'll give it a go.

a_pawson February 20 2015, 13:38:34 UTC

The Settlers of Catan is being adapted for film and TV

I know we had Battleships the movie, but seriously WTF?

I'm struggling to think of what sort of script could require them to buy the rights. It can't be for marketing reasons - Catan is a great game, but its existence is I suspect limited to a small percentage of the population.

andrewducker February 20 2015, 13:41:09 UTC

It will be the next Game of Thrones!

Or something!

But yeah, it's a bit of an odd one.

Sold 18-million copies though, so it's not _that_ small a proportion who will have heard of it. That's more people than had heard of Guardians of the Galaxy, I'd have thought :->

bart_calendar February 20 2015, 14:34:15 UTC

Here's what I've been told my marketing people about pink for girls and blue for boys.

Up until around the late 60s, in the middle class price range nearly all toys were bought by moms who were good at shopping for kids toys so t here didn't need to be that much obvious labeling. But as moms entered the workforce dads started buying more of the toys and pretty much sucked at it, so marketing people wanted to make it easy for a dumb dad to distinguish "is this toy more appropriate for my son or my daughter.)

They then did marketing surveys and found out that dumb dads associated pink with their daughters and blue with their sons so they went with that.

cmcmck February 20 2015, 14:48:16 UTC

This intrigued me enough as a historian a while back to do some research.

This pink/blue thing goes back to somewhere in the nineteen twenties and in the US, although I have been unable to trace exactly when and where the change happens. Colour film coming in may have something to do with it. The Victorians certainly thought pink way too strong a colour for girls and dressed them in blue.

It doesn't really settle down as a given until the early eighties when all the idiot toy companies piled in big time, even the likes of Lego which is the perfect non gendered toy when you think about it.

bart_calendar February 20 2015, 15:17:25 UTC

Yeah, but the 80s thing would correspond to a sort of tipping point with more dumb dads buying toys.

As I hope I made clear, this is just what fellow marketing people have told me. Since I didn't get into marketing until around 2000 I can't speak from experience.

However, it sounds like the way marketing is done now, so it wouldn't surprise me at all.

a_pawson February 20 2015, 15:08:36 UTC

Can anyone explain to me _why_ British childcare costs are so expensive?

One reason may be that the ratio of carers to children is lower in the UK than in other European countries. PDF (page 18 & 19).

andrewducker February 20 2015, 15:18:53 UTC

Might be, but the article says "the government scrapped its plan to reduce staff-to-child ratios, which was almost universally rejected as not desirable and unlikely to reduce costs"

I'd love to see a breakdown of the costs that nurseries have, and see where it's going!

a_pawson February 20 2015, 16:39:01 UTC

Staff wages must be a significant part of the cost of childcare provision. I find it hard to believe that reducing the numbers of staff would not lead to a reduction in overall costs.

andrewducker February 20 2015, 16:46:12 UTC

According to: http://www.netmums.com/coffeehouse/working-childcare-692/working-yourself-self-employed-76/wfy-discussion-ideas-research-79/967840-you-nursery-manager-deputy-member-staff-all.html

It's minimum wage for the actual carers.

And £8-£9 for the deputies, etc.

Not sure how much that would work out as a percentage of overall running costs though.

Thread 11

kalimac February 20 2015, 17:00:09 UTC

I was hoping that "The boy, whose tribe sent him away so that, one day, he might return and save their village" would turn out to be something more unexpected than the obvious of a small village in Ecuador or somewhere like that.

I discount the guy who claims that early-20C pink:boys blue:girls is a myth because he couldn't find any early-20C references to in Google ngram, simply because of the 1918 magazine quote (n.b. in a magazine, not a book) testifying to it. Unless the quote is a fake?