The Dilbert Blog

Trillion Dollar Idea

Have you heard of an online service for kids called Webkinz? It’s like a cross between cocaine and puppies. Kids can’t resist it. It’s frickin’ brilliant.

Before you use the Webkinz service, you have to buy a stuffed animal that comes with a code. You use that code to activate an animated character in an online world that looks like your stuffed animal. The brilliant part is that your online critter will become sick if you don’t regularly visit and care for it. Somehow this makes kids emotionally invested.

Kids can earn fake money by playing games on the system. That money goes toward caring for their online creatures, including buying furniture and so on. Kids love it. But I think kids aren’t the biggest market for this sort of thing.

I think single women would want an online boyfriend they could totally control. But here’s the hook: The online boyfriend is a “project.” If you don’t sign into the system regularly, your online boyfriend will start dressing with clothes from the 80’s, smoking, gambling, staying out late, and flirting with other women.

It’s the “owner’s” job to make the virtual boyfriend eat right, exercise, look for a job, and trim his nose hair. If he scratches his crotch or passes gas during an online dinner party, he gets no virtual sex for a week.

The women could earn fake online money by playing games just like in the Webkinz model. For example, imagine a Tetris-type game where articles of clothing fall from above and you have to assemble them into coordinated outfits before they reach the ground. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be a hit.

Here are some more online game ideas for the virtual boyfriend site:

- Quickly identify which movie at the Cineplex would make a human feel the worst. Send the online boyfriend to watch it.

- Send the online boyfriend to the drugstore for you and try to assemble a basket of items that is the most embarrassing.

- Make the online boyfriend carry a purse through a tough neighborhood without being beaten to death.

- How about a game set in a Mexican restaurant where all the tables have candles? The object is to navigate your online boyfriend around the tables and to the Men’s room without him tooting too near the candles and setting the other diners aflame.

Do you have any more game ideas?

Define “Free” Speech

Suppose there was a hit song that caused 80% of its listeners kill themselves. Should that song be banned, or would you argue that free speech is more important?

I think most people would take the practical approach. We already have some minor constraints on free speech. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded movie theater. You can’t defame someone in public. It would be no big deal to ban one particular song if the alternative was the death of millions.

What if the song killed fewer people? Would you ban a hit song that’s loved around the world if there was no doubt, statistically speaking, it would result in the death of ten people?

We have that situation now, except it’s not music. Every time the media makes a big deal about a high profile suicide there’s a 100% chance it inspires additional suicide.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/325/7377/1374

I first heard of this effect in the book “Influence,” by Robert B. Cialdini. The correlation between media reports of suicides and a spike in additional suicides is fairly clear. So when a big news outlet decides to run a story about a high profile suicide, there’s a near-certainty they are killing a few people to boost revenue. And they know it.

Do you have a problem with that?

This Explains Everything

I’ve often noted that all of the world’s problems are caused by people who apparently enjoy making other people miserable. I know it sounds like one of those cynical observations I often make for humorous purposes, but I mean it literally. There’s no other explanation for why people put so much effort into making others miserable.

Now there’s evidence to back my theory. According to recent research, people with high testosterone (let’s call them assholes) literally get pleasure from making other people look unhappy.

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3209

I am sooooo jealous. Making other people unhappy is as easy as, well, eating and farting.

Unfortunately for me, I’m wired the other way. I’m only happy if I can make other people happy. And that’s obviously impossible, because as soon as you give someone what he or she wants, he or she immediately want more. It’s one of those “can’t get there from here” situations.

But pissing people off? That’s simple.

I imagine myself stranded with an asshole on an otherwise deserted island. I’d be trying to increase my happiness by pleasing the asshole. I’ll be all, “Can I build you a thatch hut”? Meanwhile, the asshole would be getting all of his happiness by frequently pointing to the horizon and yelling, “Look, a ship! Nah, just kidding!”

A week later, when I’ve finished building a thatch hut for the asshole, he’d look at it and say, “Was this built by a monkey? Where’s the formal dining room? You can’t expect me to eat all of my meals at the breakfast nook. Speaking of breakfast, I ate all of your coconuts while you were working.”

My point is that I shouldn’t waste my time complaining about the war in Iraq. All I need to do is increase my levels of testosterone until I can enjoy the unhappiness of others.

Fairness

I often laugh when someone declares a thing to be fair. Fairness is a funny illusion. It’s one of our most useful illusions, but it’s an illusion nonetheless.

Imagine trying to “fairly” divide ten identical marbles between two kids. You could give five marbles to each kid, wave your arms and declare it fair. The kids would probably agree with this arrangement. The illusion of fairness works.

Is five marbles apiece actually fair?

Don’t you need to know how many marbles each kid already owns? What if one kid has a thousand and the other has none? The marginal utility of an extra marble is much higher for the marble-poor kid.

Doesn’t their different level of enthusiasm for marbles come into play? If you think about it, you’re trying to be fair with their happiness, not their marbles. What if one kid loves marbles five times more than the other? In that case, the fair thing to do is give most of the marbles to the kid who doesn’t enjoy them as much. He needs more marbles to obtain the same level of happiness as the marble lover gets with one. Of course that solution would cause one kid to melt down because it wouldn’t have the illusion of fairness.

Even the simplest example of fairness falls apart when you put it under scrutiny. Luckily, people are morons, so they imagine fairness where none exists. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I was thinking of fairness the other day when considering my next car purchase. I figure I need to do my part to conserve energy. I considered buying a fuel-efficient car that would give me no joy whatsoever. It’s the fair thing to do. We all need to pitch in.

Then I remembered I’ve never procreated. That’s a huge energy savings. When you create new humans, they start leaving the lights on, driving, eating, pooping, and doing all sorts of energy-inefficient things. By not creating any new humans, I’m saving a huge amount of energy!

I walk to work. That saves a lot of fuel too. If you consider my total energy drain on the planet, I could own a small fleet of gas-guzzlers and still be greener than 95% of the citizens of the United States. That seems fair to me.

If you were the judge in this decision, and considered all the facts, would you give me a Hummer?

Chair Butt

This week in the Dilbert comic, Alice discovers she has a bad case of chair butt. United Media, the company that syndicates Dilbert, rejected the first version I submitted. It looked like this:

My editors thought the pose looked too provocative. They requested I redraw Alice in less of a “mount me” position. I argued that in the context of a medical exam, no one would interpret her pose as sexual. This argument did not carry the day. So I went back to the drawing board with the instructions to make it look “more medical.”

At this point in the story I should pause to confess I did not attend medical school. I don’t know exactly how a trained physician would examine a patient for signs of chair butt. So I took an educated guess and resubmitted the comic. Here’s a peek.

Although my editors have no formal medical training, they were nonetheless certain my depiction of a chair butt exam was inaccurate. I went back to the drawing board a third time and drew the version that was accepted and ran in newspapers. Here it is.

What I learned from this experience is that being a doctor takes more than common sense and a willingness to look at unattractive naked people. I don’t know how much more it takes, but I intend to keep drawing comics until I find out.

Cool New Planet with a Shitty Name

Scientists discovered a planet 20.5 light years from here that seems to have the right stuff for sustaining life.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18293978/

The scientists named the planet Gliese 581 C, evidently to showcase the reason scientists can’t get laid. Science fiction writers all over the Earth are muttering, “Fuck you very much.” No one is going to buy a book titled “Escape From Gliese 581 C.”

And if we discover advanced life on that planet, what do we call them? It won’t be something easy like Martians, or Venutians. No, they will be Gliese 581 Csians – a name that practically demands we discriminate against them.

Seriously, don’t the discovering scientists have a neighbor or a friend who works in marketing? Watch me spend all of thirty seconds to come up with five better names for that bad boy. And I won’t even use New Earth or Earth V2.0. Time me.

Vektron

Albutoral

Skype

Androgena

Heedro

Done! See? How hard was that?

We don’t know if the planet already has life. I suggest we play God and put some there. 20.5 light years is too long for human travel, but we could place some hearty bacteria and whatnot in a probe and fire it in that direction. If there isn’t already life on Gliese 581 C, the bacteria and whatnot can evolve into zebras and Creationists over time. If there already is life on the planet, our bacteria and whatnot will probably infect them and wipe out their civilization. So we might want to put a Mars license plate on the probe.

Infotainment questions for the day:

1. Do we have the technology to seed that planet with life?

2. How do we know the Gliese 581 Csians didn’t seed life on Earth?

It seems to me that we now have a falsifiable hypothesis for Intelligent Design on Earth. My hypothesis is that it came from Gliese 581 C. I call that science. We should teach it in schools.

Go.

[Update: See this link for a technology that could make space travel at vast distances feasible: http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg18925331.200-take-a-leap-into-hyperspace.html]

Perfection

Something has been bothering me about the Don Imus controversy. On the surface, it’s a case where a mistake was made, and after that, everyone involved eventually did the right thing.

- People communicated their feelings in appropriate ways.

- Imus eventually acknowledged his mistake and apologized.

- Sponsors withdrew support for financial reasons.

- Imus’ employers listened to their employees, viewers, and sponsors, and fired Imus.

The young women on the Rutgers basketball team showed dignity and poise in a difficult situation. It was evident that they had good coaches and advisors, and they displayed a world-class grace under pressure.

So what was missing? How do you improve on a situation where, after the initial mistake, everyone seemed to do exactly the right thing?

What most impressed the world about the Rutgers athletes is the maturity of their response, and in particular how they went from a position of perceived powerless to a position of complete power through sheer force of character. It was beautiful in its way. And yet, something was missing.

Imus delivered his apology sincerely, and in person. The athletes accepted it. Days passed. Something is missing.

No reasonable person can fault the Rutgers team for the way they felt in this situation, nor the way they handled it. And nothing could have prepared them for the sort of power they acquired overnight. Their coaches and advisors had never been in this situation either. And while the athletes achieved greatness, how could any of them know how near to perfection they were? Their point had been made. The message had been delivered. What was missing?

Forgiveness.

They could have asked Imus’ employers to rehire him, and in so doing, shown the world the difference between greatness and perfection.

Fuel

Imagine you could make fuel out of poor people. The only downside is that the poor people have to be converted to a combustible liquid in the process. Imagine that although there are many alternatives to using poor people as fuel, those alternatives cost way more. In fact, the alternatives are so much more expensive, widespread use would impact your standard of living by about twenty percent.

Obviously using humans for fuel would be wrong and you wouldn’t do it. But I’m not done confusing your moral compass.

Now let’s say the people who are used as fuel are volunteers, of a sort. For every twenty people who volunteer to become SUV fuel, only one will be randomly selected. The other nineteen get a host of benefits including pensions and paid educations. Let’s say human fuel is so economical that one human converted to fuel pays for the benefits to the other nineteen. And the one poor person fuels an entire town’s energy needs for a year.

In this scenario, you’d be powering your car with liquefied poor people, but your conscience would be cleared by the knowledge they all volunteered. It’s a free country. They took the chance of being one of the nineteen lucky ones, but it didn’t work out. Some volunteered because they thought it was their best chance for upward mobility. Some thought it was their patriotic duty. But it was their decision. No one forced them.

Let’s say the politicians argue that in the long run, this policy of using poor people for fuel will save lives. The thinking is that we’ll eventually develop other fuel sources, but for now we need the strong economy to pay for health care and a strong national defense against terrorists and whatnot. All of the volunteers are hailed as heroes.

Under those conditions would you use poor people to fuel your car?

Bonus question: Are you already doing something close to that?

[Update: Please stop leaving Soylent Green, Jonathan Swift, a

Sliders, and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" comments. You are not the first. And this post only reminds you of those. It's not the same.]

Judging Art

People think art is subjective. Sometimes you hear opinions such as this:

“Those Harry Potter books suck.”

Logically, if you don’t personally like Harry Potter books, knowing full well that a quarter of a BILLION people do, it’s an indication that you might be abnormal, and not necessarily in a good way. Yet no one ever says, “I don’t enjoy Harry Potter books because, evidently, there’s something disturbingly abnormal about my brain. Although scientists say human and chimp DNA only differs by 2%, with me, it’s probably a lot less.”

We’re funny that way. We assume our personal preferences are the standard by which all art should be judged. I think the best way to judge the quality of art is by how well the artist achieves his objectives, whatever those might be.

Take the Garfield comic strip, for example. The creator, Jim Davis, set out years ago to create a massively popular comic strip. That was the goal of his art. He has succeeded for decades. When art achieves its goal, it has to be considered great. Sure, Garfield doesn’t make you dance or cry or fall in love. It doesn’t even amuse most adult males. So what? You can’t judge art against objectives it never held. If you judge it against the standard it seeks to achieve, it’s every bit the equal of the Mona Lisa. Likewise for the movie Borat and the TV show South Park.

Now consider the movie Titanic. It was a huge commercial success, but I have a hard time imagining the director’s artistic goal was to make the viewers feel as if someone put their dogs to sleep. Yet that’s what it did. As a business venture, Titanic was brilliant. It sold a lot of tickets. From the perspective of art, I doubt the artist’s objectives and the result lined up, unless they were sadists.

That’s how I judge art. Your mileage may vary.

Deja Comic

Yes, today’s Dilbert comic (Saturday) is a repeat. Here’s the scoop.

I submit my comics a month or so in advance, then forget about them. Yesterday I got a call from my syndication company, United Media, alerting me that the comic scheduled for today makes a casual reference to serial killing.

Obviously this is exceptionally bad timing. The average reader doesn’t know how far in advance the comics are submitted, and it would look cruel, possibly intentional, given recent events.

One option was to alert client newspapers and give them the option of running the comic or replacing it with a repeat. I decided to go further and ask all of the newspapers to run the repeat. Some papers did not get enough notice to make the change. Comics are sometimes typeset in advance, depending on what technology the newspaper company uses. So I’m in for a bumpy ride today. Wish me luck.

I apologize for any bad feelings the comic might cause for anyone who sees it.