Hi, friends!
Happy Tuesday!
Do you have any rating systems that you give major side eye to? Like you have major beef with the MPAA? Or you get annoyed that your favorite Thai restaurant has 0-4 hot peppers for the heat scale but you have to specify “3 real peppers, not 3 white person peppers”?
The other day I was watching some dumb show on Travel Channel and they showed actual crime scene photos of corpses. Some with severe trauma. And like, HBO documentary doing that? Sure. Netflix? I mean maybe. But just scrolling through cable tv at 7pm on a weeknight? Did not expect that.
Amazing that the kids can’t see a pair of boobies or some buttcheeks but a frozen corpse with the eyes torn out are okay.
The online ratings shakedown for every business drives me crazy. “We’d love it if you gave us a five star rating….”
I refuse to rate anything anymore. My understanding is that no rating at all is better for employees than a four star rating because they don’t get factored into the averages, so I just abstain. And I don’t pay any attention to online ratings either. A bunch of geniuses started all this, never thinking how this system would turn out after Year One, and lacking the guts to just revamp it.
Rating systems are inherently flawed. I know, I know, here he goes again. If he’s not bitching about polling, he’s complaining about rating systems.
The problem is that the standard five-star (or whatever) system basically a) rewards mediocrity and b) eliminates personal preference in favor of mass appeal. Restaurants are a good example. The standard quick serve restaurant focuses on generic fare that appeals to a majority of people, rather than creating unusual dishes that appeal to limited numbers. By focusing on averages, you get blah.
But for chain restaurants, that’s their job. They need volume, not quirky iconoclastic people who dine there once a month.
You can basically extend this to anything. Movies, books, whatever — if it’s appealing to a broad cross section, it’s probably pretty standard. And let’s face it, most of us are fine with standard for the most part. But the ratings system will penalize the unusual or obscure in favor of the standard.
Here, this guy gets it: https://perell.com/essay/ratings-gone-wrong/
There’s the famous bit about how the best Chinese restaurants get only 3.5 stars on Yelp.
https://www.today.com/food/trends/chinese-restaurant-3-5-star-rule-rcna47900
Was gonna mention Yelp. They seem to be the blue-ribbon example of crap rating systems. The problem is people.
I avoid most of the Yelp ratings because they either shit on good places for a mistake or a bad experience or bump up lousy places because bots or friends of the restaurant.
I just try it and avoid the whole Yelp fiasco.
@bryanlsplinter, this is it exactly “The problem is that the standard five-star (or whatever) system basically a) rewards mediocrity and b) eliminates personal preference in favor of mass appeal. ”
A local magazine does a “best of” feature once a year. We are blessed with a gazillion restaurants of all cuisine styles, in part because of our high ratio of immigrants per capita. And yet . . . for example . . . there are several Italian and/or Mediterranean restaurants around here which are seriously good. Which dining establishment wins – each year – for best Italian/Mediterranean? Olive Garden. Fie on their best of issue, I say!
EXACTLY
It’s usually who is the biggest advertiser.
Same with “Best Places to Work.” Companies just buy a top rating.
One of the things I didn’t remember about my beloved “Hawaii 5-0” from the original airing is the guns, guns, guns. Everyone has one, and there’s none of this, “De-escalate, take the person into custody, and bring the case before a grand jury.” Oh no. It’s shoot to kill, and the 5-0 is never questioned about this. Of course WE know that the perps were up to no good, and they have their own guns, so there are shootouts, and then Steve McGarrett shows up and just needs to fire one shot and the episode concludes.
I was very young when my parents tuned (literally; you had to adjust the antenna on the bureau-sized TV) into “5-0.” I won’t bore you with recaps but last night Tony Hillerman (Tom Selleck’s sidekick on “Magnum, P. I.”) showed up as this evil money launderer with a suitcase full of cash. A common “5-0” trope. The night before that, Vic Tayback (Mel from “Alice”) is a heroin-smuggling kingpin. It’s all anyone ever did on Oahu in the early 70s, carry around suitcases full of cash and smuggle heroin.
Not only are the plots amazing, and very convoluted, but with all the guest stars, and I’m not even sure all of them were any kind of stars at that point, it’s fun to lie in bed and place bets with Better Half. “Dead or alive, BH?”
“I don’t know. This was probably around 50 years ago, but if he/she were 30 then they’d be 80 now and some of those folks live to be 100.”
“Let’s see what Google has to say…”
Why am I telling you this?
I live for your 5-0 recaps. That’s why.
The Tony Hillerman one was a corker.
There’s a horse ranch in North Oahu. When a widow’s husband dies she decides to put it up for sale. She also at this point has a pretty hot boyfriend. BH claims that the boyfriend is a character actor who almost always plays villains. The boyfriend moves in and brings along a handyman. The widow is like, “OK, fine.”
So they’re in love. Or so she thinks. The widow meets with Tony Hillerman, who has been on 5-0’s radar for quite some, at a tiki lounge. He hands over a suitcase/briefcase, I can’t remember what these are called anymore. She brings it home and shows it to the boyfriend. “Isn’t it strange that it should be in cash like this?”
He pulls a gun on her and says, “Maybe I should take care of that.”
See, Tony Hillerman, the boyfriend, and the handyman, are in cahoots. The boyfriend was a plant. Now we slip into Batman territory, because rather than just killing her on the spot, they want to do to her what they did to her husband (we discover) and shoot her in a plane and throw her into a canyon. She, stoically, at gunpoint, boards this little puddle-jumper plane. It’s tiny. It’s not even a Cessna, I don’t think.
But McGarrett is on it! In his car, which is not much smaller than the plane, he cuts them off on the little runway, so they keep having to swerve back and forth, and I’m sure McGarrett had a lot of defensive driving experience. He keeps cutting them off, they go back and forth, and finally the plane crashes into the roadbank. Members of Hawaii PD are there to arrest the “boyfriend” and the “handyman” and retrieve the suitcase full of cash. My boyfriend Danno deals with Tony Hillerman.
Me, too!
They’re FUN, Cousin Matty–especially since I don’t have a TV right now (there IS one up in the storage unit, I’ll probably end up bringing it here eventually), and having *seen* so many old re-runs of the show? Being able to *read* your recaps is seriously just as enjoyable as actually*watching* it!😉
And honestly, it’s probably MORE enjoyable, because it’s allllmost like it’s own lovely little version of “Pop Up Video”!😁🤗💖
Cousin Matthew’s TV reviews:
5 stars, would recommend
Did they have a lot of those magic revolvers that could shoot 20 times without reloading?
Possibly. I don’t really know much about guns. But what I do know is that when things get hot and McGarrett shows up it’ll only take one shot to send the perp to his great reward.
Growing up in Hawaii, guns were not a thing. I knew nobody with anything other than a pellet gun. If you pulled a gun in Hawaii, you better make sure you kill everyone or you would end up dead in a cane field but not from a fun. Still, guns are for pig hunters & even that, real Hawaiians use dogs, knives or bows.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13062819/amp/hawaii-supreme-court-second-amendment-aloha-firearm-rights.html
That should say gun not fun but edit is not working for me.
I liked Tony as Howard Johnson from Blazing Saddles.
Fucking employee review systems.
One year I worked my ass off and met all objectives on time or ahead of schedule. Didn’t even make many small mistakes. Scored high on peer/customer review.
Got meets expectations.
Another year, I mentally checked out and fucked the dog. Got exceeds.
I think to get top marks at my company you have to be crawling under desks giving top execs blowies.
I worked at a place that went through a ton of work and expense to set up a stack ranking system and then gave up after a just a year. They realized they couldn’t possibly recruit and train replacements fast enough to keep the place operating.
Plus nobody wants to work at a place with stack ranking unless the company offers gigantic bonuses.
Yeah we have a theoretical 5 point evaluation system but the reality is that managers are all pressured to rate their direct reports at 3 and were supposed to tell the poor slobs that “3 is actually good!” I know this because I was a manager before ditching it to get paid more as a worker bee doing software support. Whenever I wanted to rate someone a 4 I had to go 18 rounds to justify it—and half the time I got denied anyway. This sucked for a lot of reasons but not the least of which being that your rating determined your raise percentage.
Nobody got a 5. Well…nobody but the upper level managers.
Of course the problem is that employers need some kind of standardized evaluation system in order to avoid getting sued. You can’t have individual evaluations because of the potential for abuse.
It seems like so many shitty Netflix & Prime movies are 4 or 5 stars. Who is rating these? I always look them up elsewhere but that is still a crapshoot.
Don’t get me started on those beer rating sites.
Yeah, very dumb & way too subjective. Wine goes to 100pts which is still tough to quantify but beer is usually 5 stars or ??? That’s why we all need our own Dan the beer man to tell you “you need to buy this!” He is very rarely wrong. I just had Pliny the younger on Friday, people lined up an hour before opening to get to taste it. I have shunned it for the last few years but it was totally worth it.
People don’t know what to do with good basic beers that aren’t 10% ABV and loaded with coconut and aged for five years in oak barrels. They really can’t be compared on the same scale.
Goodreads. I’ve been on there since 2012, and I have long since learned to ignore the ratings. At least half the books I read that I think are really good come up barely 3 stars, and the ones that are super popular, 5 star rated are almost inevitably total stinkers. I pay very little attention to the ratings and merely use it as a way to track my reading.
There are so many people who do the same thing as you. And like that link from BryanIsSplinter says, these ratings systems have been broken for so long why not rethink them?
I get a lot of my books, games and shows/movie suggestions from you guys and my close friends IRL. It’s a ranking system or filter that works 99% of the time. Thank you DS!
The great thing is if someone like Farscy recommends a show, you don’t know if you’ll like it, but odds are it will be interesting.
lol…ill take that as a compliment 🙂
oh man…i hate the 4 peppers system…..but mostly coz its not consistent…
4 peppers hot up here in the north of the netherlands….is still pretty mild
4 peppers hot in england blows your head off
like…..if your gonna have a rating system…it needs to be universal…otherwise its useless
(also..in the case of nipples being worse than murder….you probably shouldnt let americans be in charge of ratings….they are wierd)
At work because most of my coworkers are non white and eat hot peppers regularly so we have to go with the 4 peppers scale (non white folks edition.) Anything listed as 1 pepper is for the few white folks. It usually works.
I got surprised once because I thought this restaurant had a white people scale of hot peppers. It wasn’t. My face was red and my nose was running for a long time.
I generally avoid letting the reviews/ratings on Amazon sway me because there is always one person who hates everything. Unless something has no ratings, then I don’t trust it, or a lot of people are saying the same thing.