The "Hugo"? What the heck is a Hugo?

The Hugo is McDonald's new drink size, available only in certain markets, the Hugo is 42 oz and when filled with regular soda weighs in at an impressive 410 calories.

It's priced as low as $0.89. A hell of a deal! But who needs that much soda? From the NYT:

"People, I believe, tend to drink more during the summer," said Danya Proud, a McDonald's spokeswoman. "People are out and about."

She said the Hugo was being offered because of customer demand, and so far, it has sold quite well. Ms. Proud cautioned about comparing the Hugo to McDonald's old Supersize menu.

"That's not what this is about," she said. "You have to put it in context with the rest of our menu."

Did McDonald's Give In to Temptation? [NYT]
(Photo:Noah Berger/NYT)

Why do we hate him? He's everything we advocate against — irresponsible and duplicitous consumerist complaint. His various studies, "documentaries" and critiques are nothing but junk science lazily arranged to support presupposed conclusions. If you want more detail on that, flip through this blog. We're sorry — we aren't going to take dietary advice from a man who first made his mark paying people on MTV to eat dog feces.

Nevertheless, McDonald's has had a PR nightmare on their hands ever since the release of Super Size Me... and now there are rumblings that a recent site that has been launched called 30 Day Dieters is actually being fronted by McDonald's themselves. The site features the testimonies of people who ate sensibly at McDonald's for thirty days and lost weight, and these accounts are real. But we've talked before about how companies are best served in their full disclosure of their marketing attempts on the Internet and the blogosphere. Doing otherwise just makes us trust them less, less likely to listen to their points.

Hey, McDonald's — if you have something to say and have the proof to back it up, we'll listen. But don't try to fool us. None of us are as stupid as the corporate world seems to believe and we don't need a Golden Arches slapped on the template to see through your patronizing charade.

Link: McDonald's Spurlock countermeasures [Fast Food Nation]

Well, no, you idiot. Mind Hacks argues (as would even a half-stoned community college philosophy freshman, but more eloquently) that changes in behavior do not imply the absence of freewill. Here's an interesting passage:

People faced a similar dilemma in the nineteenth century when statistics were first compiled of suicides. If we can predict from census records that the number of suicides in a parish in a year will be around seven, where does that leave the free will of those who 'choose' to kill themselves that year? Are you taking away the freedom of the seven people who now have to die to fulfill your prediction?

Exactly. Wanting a medium but then super-sizing to a large even after you've decided not to buy a large doesn't make you an automoton. It just makes you a bad consumer and a buffoon. However, it does bring in a solipsistic conceptual problem: if I've never been stupid enough to super-size a medium popcorn, but everyone else does, does that mean that all other consumers except me are automotons? Or, as Mind Hacks puts it, "Free will seems to dissolve as you draw away from it - as an individual I don't feel manipulated, but when i look at other people - especially groups of other people, it seems like I can see manipulation going on."

Note to Mind Hacks: that's because people are stupid as an aggregate.

Link: Does Advertising Erode Free Will? at Mind Hacks.