Greg Kogan:

Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that “downtime” for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help.

Take the ship’s steering system, for instance. The rudder is pushed left or right by metal rods. Those rods are moved by hydraulic pressure. That pressure is controlled by a hydraulic pump. That pump is controlled by an electronic signal from the wheelhouse. That signal is controlled by the autopilot. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist or a naval architect to find the cause of and solution to any problem:

Keep it simple and elegant: amuz and My Verse.

John Herrman:

Maybe it’s cold, and you need some winter gloves. You know the brand of your favorite coat and remember who made your warmest sweater. Gloves, however, have always just been gloves, purchased without too much thought. So you open up Amazon and search: “winter gloves.”

On the first page you might see a brand you’ve heard of before, like Carhartt, whose W.P. Waterproof Insulated Glove, priced in my search at $24.37, has been positively reviewed thousands of times. Scroll a bit further and you might find the venerable Isotoner offering another popular basic glove.

Mostly, you’ll notice gloves from brands that, unless you’ve spent a lot of time searching for gloves on Amazon, you’ve never heard of. Brands that evoke nothing in particular, but which do so in capital letters. Brands that are neither translated nor Romanized nor transliterated from another language, and which may contain words, or names, that do not seem to refer to the products they sell. Brands like Pvendor, RIVMOUNT, FRETREE and MAJCF. Gloves emblazoned with names like Nertpow, SHSTFD, Joyoldelf, VBIGER and Bizzliz. Gloves with hundreds or even thousands of apparently positive reviews, available for very low prices, shipped quickly, for free, with Amazon Prime.

Andrew Marantz:

Eric Wilson, Marco Rubio’s digital director during his Presidential run, in 2016, told me, “The best online marketers are agnostic, as opposed to prescriptive. Anyone with a lot of money can buy a lot of ads, but what really matters is measurement, because without that you have no idea which ads are having any effect.” This sort of measurement is the province of “ad-tech” firms. Clients decide which metrics they want maximized—often some quantitative measure of success on Google and Facebook, which together control about half of the online ad market—and the ad-tech firms optimize for that outcome. In the summer of 2016, Parscale hired two leading ad-tech firms—Sprinklr, based in New York, and Kenshoo, based in Tel Aviv—to send subcontractors to work for him in San Antonio. Sprinklr also assigned remote employees, stationed in various time zones, to crunch numbers at all hours. In addition to data provided by the R.N.C. and traditional voter files, the Trump campaign had access to a repository of information provided by the Data Trust, a private company that Karl Rove and other conservative bigwigs had established in 2011. There are restrictions that prevent certain kinds of data sharing among nonprofit political entities, but those don’t apply to for-profit companies.

The Obama campaigns used Facebook and other digital tools extensively, as well.

2018: Facebook and elections event.