Eeeeew! Yesterday’s New York Times had an eight-page story on the antics of an Internet criminal: a fraud artist who takes people’s money for genuine brand names, sends counterfeits, or maybe just pockets the money, threatens his customers with bodily harm or worse when they complain—and is delighted by the complaints because they get him great positions in Google! Somehow, he manages to keep his merchant account and mostly stay out of jail.
According to the Times article, he has even had someone call up a customer’s credit card-issuing bank pretending to be the customer, withdrawing the fraud complaint. He’s the sort of person that makes you want to wash your hands with strong soap after just reading about him.
I am not going to risk increasing his Google juice by naming him or his company. You can get all that in the Times article. And promise me you’ll read it before buying any designer eyewear online.
Given the appalling lack of business ethics, the clear and numerous cases of fraud, the monstrous encyclopedia of wronged customers, I don’t understand why he hasn’t been shut down. These are the sort of people who give business, and especially online business, a bad name. This is massive fraud and theft—and the credit card processing companies, law enforcement agencies, and of course his hundreds of victims need to band together to shut him down permanently and show him that even though it may take a while, ultimately, crime doesn’t pay. I’d love to see him get a looong sentence.
It sounded like a good idea from the blurb posted on the International Network of Social-Eco Entrepreneurs LinkedIn discussion board:
Ever wanted an energy question answering by the world’s leading experts?!
For all of you reading this, here is a rare opportunity to ask your toughest energy-related questions to the world’s leading energy scientists, including Dr Clement Bowman, Tom Blees, José Goldemberg, Marta Bonifert and Ambassador Pius Yasebasi Ng.
But when I got to the article, I was so appalled by some of the panelists’ credentials that I posted this:
Why are advocates of dirty technologies like tar-sands extraction and nuclear power judging energy prizes for a group called Eco-Business? If you look at the entire production cycle, including externalized pollution factors, these are among the dirtiest of all energy sources.
I believe our real energy future lies with much cleaner, fully renewable technologies like solar, wind, and hydro–all on a human scale and generating power at or near the point of use–and especially with what Amory Lovins calls “negawatts”: slashing energy consumption in existing buildings, vehicles, etc. Energy savings of 50 to 80 percent are achievable in many cases, thus removing the need to build more centralized power plants in the first place.
–Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, https://GreenAndProfitable.com
By overwhelming vote of the Steering Committee, the International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers is now the International Association of Green Marketers. If you want to be notified when we’re ready to accept members (still hashing out the organizational stuff first), please sign up at https://internationalassociationofgreenmarketers.com/. If you want to be involved with the Steering Committee, post a comment below (with your contact info) or shoot me an e-mail: shel at principledprofit.com
As it happens, my breakfast reading this morning was the latest Utne Reader, specifically an article called “The Big Green Machine.”
It describes a speaking tour featuring four veterans speaking on climate change and energy independence. The vets are one unit in Operation Free, sponsored by the Truman National Security Project, which has an all-star board fronted by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Vets speaking as part of Operation Free have logged 25,000 miles in 21 states to make the case that switching off oil to renewable energy is crucial not only to our prosperity, but also to our national security. Speakers note that both the Department of Defense and the CIA have endorsed the energy transition and are taking major steps forward. “These are not organizations known for hugging polar bears,” points out Robin Eckstein, a former Army fuel truck driver in Iraq.
This might be the way we make change as a society: by moving people from sectors not typically involved in activism to convince others who don’t listen to activists.
Drew Sloan, who was badly inured in a grenade attack and went back for another duty tour in Iraq, says even if we don’t know everything, we have to make the shift:
When [people attack] the science of climate change, they ridicule the data as being uncertain. “Veterans know you can’t wait for 100 percent certainty. If you wait until everything is clear and laid out, you’re probably no longer alive. . . . Veterans know how to deal with ambiguity and still make decisions.
As Ms. Eckstein notes,
When certain individuals hear the words “climate change,” they shut down. For whatever reason, when they hear veterans speak on it, they actually listen.
I found some bits especially startling: According to the IBM researcher leading the team,
“The cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.”
“In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs – to run a data centre will cost more than to build it.”
“It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives.”
Even the early protoype of the team’s water-cooled computer is half again as fast as today’s fastest supercomputers—but it’s larger than a refrigerator. Scientists want to shrink it to the size of a sugar cube!
Just a quick brag: Monday, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, my hometown paper in Northampton, Massachusetts, became the first newspaper to contract for and publish an installment of my new column, Green And Profitable (Note: this paper may not let you see it if you’re not a subscriber–but it’s one of the sample columns on this site).
1 down, 999 to go to make my goal of 1000 paying markets for the column within two years.
Friday, I got a press release from the American Booksellers Association, crowing that a lawsuit against New York State’s “sales tax fairness” law–which states that any company using affiliates based in New York has a “nexus” in the state, and thus is subject to sales tax–had been dismissed on most counts.
The question of sales tax fairness has been a bone of contention between mail-order/online and physical stores for more than a decade (I wrote a piece about this ten years ago, in fact). Brick-and-mortar retailers claim that mail-order and (more recently) online merchants have an unfair price advantage because they don’t have to charge and remit sales tax. The remote merchants claim they aren’t actually doing business in the state, and that shipping charges shift the inequality back out. However, sales tax is usually a lot more than shipping, especially for small items like books and CDs.
As a very tiny online merchant who sells info products online and through the mail, my issue is a bit different. I do see it as unfair that we onliners don’t have to collect sales tax. However, it would be a crushing burden to have to collect and remit taxes in the hundreds of jurisdictions where our customers live—California alone has a different tax structure for almost every community, involving state, county, and local taxes in varying amounts. And what happens with international sales? Such a requirement would force hundreds, perhaps thousands of merchants to close or drastically reconfigure their businesses.
So what would be fair? Here are a couple of ideas.
1. Tax all purchases in the merchant’s home jurisdiction. On the plus side, merchants are already set up to collect and pay these taxes; all we’d have to do is change our order forms to collect tax on all product purchases. On the minus side, this would skew revenues. Amazon’s hometown of Seattle or eBay’s of San Jose would benefit enormously, while small municipalities (or those who don’t happen to have a mail-sales megagiant in their borders) are left out in the cold. Probably not the best solution.
2. Collect sales tax in a national pool at the same fixed rate for all localities, use software to automatically allocate it by purchase amount and purchaser’s zip code, and distribute it, less a small administrative fee (perhaps 1 percent of all the tax collected).
3. Provide free software to every merchant that would determine and automatically debit the proper tax without adding administrative burdens.
Both 2 and 3 potentially could be cheated by a skilled hacker, which makes me nervous.
4. Eliminate the sales tax entirely for both physical and virtual businesses, and replace the revenues with income tax or some other mechanism. In today’s political climate? I think this would be a non-starter.
In short, I don’t think we have the answer yet. But I agree with the ABA that the current system of a free ride for the virtuals and a big squeeze on the physicals is not equitable (and has probably contributed to the sad demise of so many downtown storefronts)
Heretic that I am, I’m going to take an unpopular position: that the Democrats lost not because they were too bold, but because they weren’t bold enough. As all the “pundits” tell the Democrats (as they always do) to move ever-more-rightward, I’ll say, yet again, that moving rightward and wimp-ward is why they keep losing!
The strength of the Tea Party vote is more than a repudiation of Obama. It’s also a repudiation of the “mainstream” GOP (which was already so far to the right that people like Nelson Rockefeller or Lowell Weicker would have found it very uncomfortable).
The massive switch of independent voters, in particular, was, in short, a continuation of the 2008 Obama call for “change”: a loud cry that people didn’t feel they actually received the change they had voted for in 2008.
And this can be pinned squarely on the Democrats’ failure to make bold policy, and to be willing to tell the story of their success boldly. On health care, on climate change, on the economy…the Democrats whittled themselves down to half-measures. Where was the single-payer health care program that almost every other country in the world has adopted in some form (and why didn’t they position that as the boon to the business community that it is)? Where was the Marshall Plan-scale effort to get us off fossil and nuclear and into job-creating, carbon-slashing clean renewable energy? Where were the measures to hold Wall Street and the GW Bush administration accountable for the mess they made? And where were the visionary leaders who should have populated Obama’s Cabinet?
Despite a huge mandate for change, and a majority in both House and Senate, the Democrats refused to even listen to calls for massive structural reform, and then forgot all the marketing lessons they learned in the campaign and let the other side not just control but completely dominate the discourse—leaving the impression that they are a weak and ineffectual party of favors to special interests who can’t fix the economy or anything else. And failing on three crucial aspects of marketing: to remind people firstly of who got us into this mess, second, of the steps they did take to pull us out, and third, of the policy initiatives where change was actually achieved in the last two years.
Don’t apologize for your beliefs. Three out of the four most recent prior Democratic nominees–Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry–all crawled on their bellies with messages that basically said, “umm, I’m not really a liberal, I didn’t mean it, I’m soooo sorry!” And all three lost because doing that took the wind right out of their sails. Bill Clinton, who is not a liberal, didn’t play that game. Not surprisingly, he won. Obama never apologized, ignored the L-word, and didn’t even flinch when in the closing days, McCain revved it up and actually called him a socialist (traditionally, the kiss of death in US politics).
Monday evening, Rachel Maddow released a video highlighting Obama’s accomplishments. It’s a great video. The Democratic Party itself should have made something like it, six months ago, and worked to get it viral. Released by an outside journalist, twelve hours before the polls opened, it had no time to gather momentum.
Here in Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick wasn’t given much chance a year ago. But he ran a positive campaign focused on the slogan, “Optimism and Effort.” He highlighted his accomplishments over and over again, made a case that the work wasn’t done, and inspired audiences with a message of hope, economic recovery, and the rights of ordinary people. In other words, he used the exact strategies I’ve been advocating for decades that the Democrats use. Despite his somewhat centrist record, he was able to position himself as a change agent. I went to one of his rallies and went up to him afterward to thank him for being a sitting governor bold and hopeful enough to go out and make that kind of speech.
He did benefit from a third-party candidate who clearly drew votes from the colorless, bland GOP candidate. But still, he won, and by a larger margin than many pundits had predicted.
