Midrange Weekly Nov 8

You’re Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention

  • Midrange Staff @midrangeyvr

Good day mates, welcome back to Midrange Weekly. Hopefully by now we have all adjusted to the the disorienting and spectral discontinuity that is the daylight savings time change. While we can all agree it is a laborious task to acclimate to, can we please stop posting those stupid twitter jokes about how, ‘if you are in America set your clocks back 50 years’, please? The joke is played out. It’s over. We did it, it’s done. On a more positive note this last week marked the anniversary of Rudy Guliiani’s Four Seasons Landscaping press conference which remains the funniest event in political incompetence of our life times. If Biden doesn’t make it a national holiday then he is a coward. Speaking of democratic blunders, let’s dig in to the week.

 

The Virginia Election Is Threat Level Midnight For The Democrats

I’m currently searching for the perfect, most acutely apt metaphor regarding the recent Virginia gubernatorial election. Something along the lines of its working class citizenry and a canary in a coal mine as an analogous indicator to the Democratic Party’s dwindling prospects and outlook leading into the 2022 midterms. Of course as a mere observer, free to wax on this matter in a disassociated and academic sense, I can ponder fairly obvious and plaintive literary tools in regards to analyzing the Virginia contest. Contrast this with actual operatives in the democratic party who have less rhetorical freedom beyond freaking the hell out over the results. Virginia has been a small scale, compartmentalized disaster for Biden’s party, one whose implications may very likely be extrapolated upon the entire country in the congressional midterms next year. Democratic candidate and more or less incumbent Terry McAuliffe lost the election to republican businessman turned politician (naturally) Glenn Youngkin. If they haven’t hit the panic button yet, their fist is hovering precipitously low over the glass box, ready to break it at any point. 

One may curiously object to the idea of assuming a fundamental linkage between the outcome of one governorship and the larger array of congressional seats up for grabs 12 months from now. However, there is some foreshadowing at play here consistent with historical trends. The Virginia governor race has gone to the non-incumbent national party for 12 out of the last 13 elections (the one exception was when Terry McAuliffe himself, a democrat, won in 2013 when Obama was in office). Couple this with the equally codified trend that the incumbent party almost always looses seats in congress during the midterms, and you can start to measure not just if trends are lining up, but to what degree and intensity.

It’s here that Biden himself comes into play, in regards to his standing both in Virginia and in a national context. Biden won Virginia in the 2020 election by 10 points. Even if McAuliffe came through in a squeaker of a win with say a 2 points, that’s still a net loss of 8 points in terms of Virginia’s general perception of the democratic party as a whole. Instead it was Youngkin who won by 2 indicating a polling decline of minus 12 points. That’s a disastrous drop in a mere 12 month period. These metrics are occurring in the shadow of Biden’s own declining approval rating. Up until mid August Biden was polling just over 50%, which is to say relatively if not soaringly popular. However the tail end of summer brought numerous complications and blunders in the form of a chaotic Afghan pull out, a resurgent delta variant, and supply strain issues becoming exacerbated as opposed to mitigated. Just as Americans may have thought Biden had steered them through the worst hubristic excesses or apathetic incompetence of his predecessor, many of those factors obstinately refused to recede, calling Biden’s own competency into question. Thusly his approval rating has plummeted to plus 42.9 and minus 50.7, a perilous position surpassed in perceived ineptitude only by Trump during this period in his own term. Big yikes. 

So while it is something of a forgone conclusion that the democrats will likely lose seats in the House of Representatives and the senate, the extent of the Virginia loss and his own image dragging the party down has been the source of much of the aforementioned hysteria. With such a precarious position encroaching on them at the state and federal level they are no doubt frantically and assiduously attempting to extract the right lessons from the recent election. Of course, the democrats are famously, hilariously bad at reading the room and their attendant tealeaves, so let’s see how that’s going. Already a number of prognosticators, both of the arm chair and inexplicably paid-to-do-this variety, are claiming McAuliffe was out of touch and too indentured to the far left of the party, thus alienating the working class polity of the states; the blame AOC rationale in other words. It’s amazing, considering the ubiquity of that arguments deployment across a disparate spectrum of issues, how much more capable the democrats are at mobilizing against their own left flank than they are against the GOP, but that’s show business baby?

In reality McAuliffe didn’t run on much of an ideological or sectarian standing, but rather mostly spent the duration of his campaign dragging Trump. This is ostensibly not the worst strategy as the former president’s own polling is pretty underwater, a reality that Youngkin was astutely cognizant of. He threaded the needle by not exactly dissociating himself from Trump, but avoided being too obsequious to him also. McAuliffe didn’t have the worst idea ever here; it’s just that it makes for a fairly anaemic campaign in the long run that does little to truly excite voters. Herein lies the central issue to McAuliffe’s campaign and how it correlates to the democrats at large: what exactly do they have to run on? The answer, crucially and frustratingly is not much. Biden’s Build Back Better agenda has been trapped in legislative purgatory almost as long as has existed, always just short of a coalition to get it through even on the democratic side. His party just recently passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill but that seems kind of like a perfunctory bare minimum after months of haranguing on it. Biden’s stalled larger agenda is having a huge impact on voters perception of their ability or even willingness to get things done. 

Americans are sick and tired of the most powerful people in the world telling them there is nothing they can do. They have had it with legislative proposals as popular and also perplexingly absent from the social safety net like paid sick live or extended parental leave being thwarted by two senators content to cynically bask in their myopic relevancy and their lobbyist payouts. Our nominal democrat Senator Joe Manchin spends his time fleeing his constituents as he transitions from his house boat to his $80000 Maserati, meanwhile Senator Krysten Sinema takes it as a point of pride to be as indecipherable and inscrutable as possible, unless it’s pharmaceutical companies she is dealing with in which case her opaqueness becomes compliance. People are sick of a system so corroded as to allow for Manchin and Sinema’s malignant corruption to be normalized and even luxuriated. The democrats say how important it is to mobilize, strategize, get out and vote, keep pushing every day against the authoritarian vectors the GOP has reorganized its ideological tenants upon. What do they get out of it? Extreme partisan gerrymandering and the leaders of the party saying they are impotent to do anything about it. Of course they are frustrated; that frustration translates pretty clearly into antipathy, which in the voting booth becomes entropy and then atrophy- the shrinking of the democratic coalition.

All of this doesn’t even factor in Youngkin’s outrageously immoral mendacity in regards to how he ran his campaign - specifically on the education front. Zeroing in on the satanic panic style hysteria- which is to say erroneously considered and also stupid- around the perpetual critical race theory controversy, Youngkin managed to scare not so much the demographic of parents specifically, but just white people in general. Stoking fears and ignorant monomania amongst his constituents that children in grade school would be indoctrinated into believing that white people were inherently evil and therefore would feel bad about it (or something?), Youngkin went to especially pernicious lengths to misrepresent what CRT entails and also its functional implementation. Suffice to say that CRT is a dynamic and complex curriculum far more nuanced than ‘racism is bad’, but examines the societal and institutional factors that allowed for malignant racism to exist in more subtle and ambient forms across the centuries in America.

In other words, it is complicated stuff that while highly vital learning material, it is simply not being taught outside of post secondary and graduate school levels. CRT does not exist in grade or high school, it was never intended to; a fact that Youngkin went out of his way to obscure when whipping white people into a frenzy. Proto fascists movements will often misanthropically tie any educational curriculum that elevates the perspective of minorities to the obtuse and specious descriptor of ‘Marxism’, a term so functionally watered down to mean anything among GOP propaganda that it has become essentially meaningless. Youngkin deployed this strategy relentlessly and it seems to have paid off. Slate covered a great deal of polling in Virginia leading up to the election detailing voters manufactured anxiety about CRT. 

 Published polls in Virginia didn’t explore whether the attacks on CRT, unlike cruder appeals to white resentment, were particularly effective in luring upper-income suburbanites back to the GOP. But national polling suggests they probably were. In a YouGov/Yahoo! News survey taken last month, 79 percent of voters with annual incomes above $100,000 said they had heard of CRT, versus just 43 percent of those making under $50,000. Among those higher earners, 39 percent said that children shouldn’t be exposed to CRT in school, while 29 percent said they should. (The rest were unsure or unfamiliar with the topic.)

 Note how misleading the question is; not if it CRT has any academic merit, but if it should be taught to children. Again, CRT is not being taught to children, in the same manner that advanced physics isn’t- it’s complicated. Nevertheless Youngkin’s manipulative smear camping worked because the democrats did nothing or little to correct the narrative. No putting into context under what circumstances is CRT integrated into a curriculum, no challenging of Youngkin or his supplicants to explain what CRT actually entails, no asking a single parent who isn’t white what they thought of the history and structural attributes of racism being more thoughtfully ruminated upon in any kind of classroom. Instead we got the same prosaic complaining from white parents about having to have difficult conversations about racism with their children while their understanding of it is still incubating, as if that isn’t exactly their job. Instead we got the same media narrative of asking over and over again ‘how young is too young to learn about racism’. Maybe ask those that had to learn about it the actual hard way.

The lesson from Virginia is that GOP controls the narrative with little challenge, and the democrats remain reactively impotent. They bemoan in endless perpetuity their disconnect from the white working class, and yet completely ignore the largest union backed general strikes in American history happening all across the nation right now. They decry structural disadvantages instituted at the state level with the expressed intention of facilitating GOP cheating yet ignore federal responses that could nullify such craven tactics. They go to delirious lengths to appease moderates even though it’s consistently not them at every level in electoral infrastructure delivering them wins. If the democrats are so afraid to seize their own power, why bother fight for it? The onus is on them to answer that question themselves, not to have the voters do it for them at the polls. -Tristan

 

To Explore then Exploit

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

Leave it to Derek Thompson from The Atlantic to once again help me clarify another idea I’ve had swimming in my head of late. What am I referring to? I’ll explain that a bit further along. 

First a little context. 

This past Monday, Thompson penned a simple, yet, wonderfully insightful column titled: Hot Streaks in Your Career Don’t Happen by Accident. The broad thesis of his article is centred around two specific action points, exploration and exploitation. The thought being that the more one tries out new ideas— as in explore — the greater the possibility of being able to exploit from what one has learned, thus creating the conditions for success.

As I read along, the first image which came to mind with regards to this theory was that of tennis player Roger Federer. His story came my way a few years back when I read David Eptein’s fantastic book on human development and how best to develop one’s skills. Ironically, Thompson references Epstein’s book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, later on in his feature. 

Anyways…what Epstein discusses concerning Roger Federer was how he dabbled in a myriad of sports and activities while growing up. Federer’s wide breadth of time spent fostering skill sets in other things not named Tennis would invariably prove immensely valuable to his overall talent development and motor skill acquisition. Essentially, by playing more things, his ability to become great at one thing was that much more attainable. Nowadays this type of ideology is seen as a big no no with parents who want their children to grow up and become the next Tiger Woods as it seems more congruent with how our logical brains work. More time spent on one thing should cause one to become a master no? 

Well, not quite. For a select few, those rare Tiger Woods’ of the world, this type of focused development works, but for the vast majority, it does not and this is where Thompson’s feature has caused me to wonder about a restaurant trend I’ve been seeing of late. More on that in a sec. 

From The Atlantic:

In 1991, the Stanford Graduate School of Business professor James G. March published an influential paper, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” which broke down work into two big categories: exploring new ideas and exploiting old certainties. Say you’re a car manufacturer. Every year, you must decide between investing in future innovations, such as self-driving software, and finding ways to squeeze new revenue out of existing technologies and materials. Too much fanciful R&D spending, and this year’s profit plummets. Too much emphasis on tweaking existing product lines, and you get squashed by some fresh upstart in a decade.

This past spring I wrote a series of short columns centred around finding new ways the restaurant industry could look to grow their market share. You can read them, here, here and here. With each entry, I tried to look for radical or out of the box ideas the sector could explore, such as fluctuating prices, going public via a SPAC or selling merchandise via NFT’s. Each concept I knew going in would not work for the vast majority of establishments, as each suggestion itself wasn’t my main focus. What I aimed to inspire was exploratory thinking. The hope was that those who read each entry, ideally restaurant folk, would walk away viewing their work or business differently. Did it work? I’m not sure. I haven’t received any credit or royalties yet for some successful project, but it’s early. My time might come. In the meantime, to tie things to what Thompson has written this week, the notion of exploring then exploiting got me thinking about the hospitality industry in Vancouver today. From what I’ve been noticing, we might be going through our own version of explore then exploit progress right now — albeit in a mini fashion.

Here, let me explain.  

Over the past few months I’ve witnessed a shift with operators and entrepreneurs in their concepts, something in the past I’d yet to expect. One of these shifts is the dual concept cafe/convenience store which now has several entrants claiming space in this sphere. Are they a byproduct of trying to survive through the pandemic? Possibly. Nonetheless, with Collective Goods, Oh Carolina, The Canteen and Mucker Next Door arriving on the scene over the past four months, the lens with which one has viewed either of these ideas — cafe or convenience store — has now changed. And just that subtle adjustment can be the difference which makes the difference. 

One of the best things the pandemic gave everyone was time. Time to think. Time to be creative. Time to assess one’s standing and career. And with luck, for some, this passage of time, coupled with a pressure to pay rent, forced and helped produce some fresh and original thought. For so long those who toiled in this field time was of a scarce resource. An afterthought. Something you’d get too or try another day. Thankfully, as it appears today — albeit in a small way — those days might be numbered. New ideas are emerging and I’m optimistic more are on the way. 

Because, let’s face it, it’s easy to just sit idle and let your room, food, drink and service sell you from night-to-night. The Donnelly Group did that for years but eventually their brand became stale. Dated. Out of touch. Hence why they sold off half their lot and opened creative concepts like Sing Sing and Ballyhoo. In 2021, with a pandemic still lurking like a creepy step uncle, innovation is best and definitely the way to go. However, as I laud and promote such progress, I realize I’ve only given a small sample of new thought regarding Vancouver’s changing hospitality scene, and well, honestly, that’s alright. For a sector which has gone through the ringer of COVID-19 and barely come out alive on the other end, risk taking is sure to be a low priority for a vast majority. 

This leads me to my last point here. 

From The Atlantic:

The point is not that exploration is good and exploitation is bad. It’s that all success — career success, corporate thriving, national flourishing — requires that we pay close attention to the interplay between scouting new ideas and pumping established wells. By and large, America seems to suffer from too much exploitation and too little exploration. “We’ve gotten very good at encouraging people to be more and more focused and at penalizing people who wander outside their lane,” Wang said. “I don’t think America is particularly good at rewarding novel thinking.” Indeed, we have a national scouting deficit, because our theories of success emphasize immediate productivity in a way that might obscure the benefits of a little bewilderment and curiosity.

What Thompson has written here touches so well with many of our beliefs when thinking of the hospitality industry. Safe is burgers and pizza as they hit home with our exploit mode of knowing what works. Opening a crêperie and cider bar as the team from Au Comptoir have recently done is novel. Well, I mean if this were Paris, not really. But in Vancouver, absolutely. They’re going to smash and I’m excited for them. But what they’re doing is exploring a new concept in a market that doesn’t have a past history with their product. I hope their success and those of the four I’ve mentioned above leads others to not fear swaying off the beaten path so to speak. What may seem ludicrous could be the next hit tomorrow. 

To explore then exploit. Curious as the cat they say. Vancouver, you may be on to something.  - Jamie

 

Things From The Internet We Liked

 

If Libraries Were Like Delis

You don’t need much more of a description of this Tik Tok short beyond the above descriptor, other than this is absolutely, undisputedly the best clip on the internet this week. We will not be taking any counter arguments.

 

Vox Drops The Second Episode In Their Future Perfect Meat Series

When watching this video you’re probably not going to come away seeing or learning anything you most likely don’t already know or suspect. However, what this excellent explainer gives is an inside perspective of those who are at the mercy of these companies - specifically women and people of colour. Throughout our entire agricultural sector, it’s the stories of individuals who have come to the US (we have this problem in Canada as well) hoping for a better life. They get it in some fashion, with increased safety, but the work we expect them to do at the wages they are paid is maddening. Ask yourself it you’d be willing to pay for wings or chicken which are $5 more expensive knowing that the added cost went to those who do this type of work. I hope your answer is yes.

Out of sight out of mind. That’s the problem.

 

New Rules From Bill Maher

Gotta love when he points out our own hypocrisy in such funny fashion. How the hell does Kylie Jenner have over 279 million followers????? That’s insane. I digress.

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MIDRANGE WEEKLYdavid mcleod ringuetteVirginia, Democrats, Biden, Tik Tok, restaurants, explore, exploit, The AtlanticComment