Month: June 2013

By Posted on Posted in Diversity, poverty, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Today, I am proud to be an American.

When I attended my first same-sex commitment ceremony, sometime around 1980, I never thought I’d see so much progress, so fast. In 1982, I went to the first LGB pride march in Northampton, Massachusetts—and some of the marchers wore bags over their heads to protect their idenities.

In 2005, just 23 years later, my own state of Massachusetts became the first to legalize same-sex marriage. And now, with today’s Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay marriage, several major ripples happen:

  • California will likely become the 13th state to legalize marriage equality, and that will mean about 30 percent of the US population will live in a place where partners of the same gender can marry
  • The wretched DOMA, the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” (I prefer to call it the Desecration of Marriage Act) is invalidated, and the numerous discriminatory practices it enshrined are nullified—creating economic equality for same-sex relationships in such matters as inheritance, hospital visitation rights, and spousal benefits (DOMA is the worst kind of compromise—the kind that makes no one happy)
  • The US is well on its way to joining the 14 other countries that have legalized gay marriage, and thus joined the 21st century on this issue: not just the progressive hotspots of Northern Europe, but even two countries in South America (with Brazil expected to join them soon) and one in Africa

So what does it mean? Living in a state where same-sex marriage has been legal for 8 years, I can tell you that it has broken down a lot of barriers. When people realize that the same-sex couples in their community are just neighbors, working with them on the block beautification committee or school parent association—struggling with the same issues, sharing the same triumphs—a lot of the prejudice goes away. Just as we’ve seen a huge change in relations between races after the legal apartheid of the segregated south went away, we’ll see a gradual dissipation of prejudice as people of different sexual orientations rub shoulders in multiple contexts.

Congratulations to the Supreme Court, to all my lesbian and gay friends, to the Obama administration that urged this decision—and to my country.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Advertising, Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Aaargh! Tomorrow is an election day in Massachusetts. We’ve been getting calls for months, but today, its completely out of hand.

–> In the past two hours, from 6 to 8 p.m., I have received FOUR calls. Two from Democratic Party volunteers, one human from the National Writers Union and one NWU robocall. This doesn’t count the barrage of calls over the past week and earlier today.

In an era where the NSA can read our phone logs, I don’t understand why the Democrats and their allies can’t run a “merge-purge” to eliminate duplicates. That technology has been part of the direct-mail world since the 1970s.

If Republican Gabriel Gomez wins tomorrow against Democrat Ed Markey, I’d wager that it was because the Dems over-called to the point of harassment, and turned people off. Since there are more Democrats than Republicans by a huge margin, more Democrats than Republicans will get annoyed.

Personally, I have a low regard for Mr. Gomez and a reasonable degree of agreement with many of Congresman Markey’s positions. And so I will vote Democratic tomorrow. But I also have a ery low opinion of repeat intrusion marketing. I will vote for Markey despite the campaign’s tactics, and not because of them.

As a marketer, I hope the campaign can survive its own excesses.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Since about 1980, I’ve felt that we could solve a lot of our urban problems by seeing flat city roofs (and for that matter, roofs in suburban shopping centers, etc.) as resources: places where we can harvest energy with solar collectors—but also harvest food.

But when I started talking about my brainstorm, people told me that the roofs were not designed to bear the weight of a dense garden, and the amount of reinforcement they needed would make the whole idea unworkable. I never quite believed this. It seemed to me that if you were to put one or two 200 square-foot gardens onto a 2000 square foot roof, the weight load could be distributed across the entire rooftop without much difficulty. But I’m not an engineer.

Still, I wasn’t surprised to see the “green roof” movement emerge over the past ten years or so—but I was disappointed at how few green roofs seem to grow edible crops.

I do think community food self-sufficiency—particularly in urban areas–is a big part of the answer to “how do we reclaim our economy—and our bodies?” and a great antidote to the very dangerous practices of “chemiculture” [a word I personally coined, BTW], GMO seed strains, and the attempt by Monsanto and similar companies to exercise a terrifying degree of control over (and damage to) our food supply.  So I was delighted when I found these folks in the Bronx, using 6000 square feet of the 10,000-square-foot roof of a city-owned apartment building, to commercially grow hydroponic greens. With hydroponics, there is no soil, and therefore the issue of weight and roof support is moot. In this short video, Farm Manager Kate Ahearn gives us some background about the project. (I did make one error. I referred to a supermarket rooftop farm in Lynn, Mass. It’s actually in LynnFIELD.)

This model, with hydroponic gardens and protection from the elements, offers a 12-month growing season and numerous harvests. Yes, it’s more expensive to set up than a basic soil-based garden, but the payback is much greater. And as a green marketing guy, I see profitable, sustainable, earth-friendly businesses like this as a big step forward not only in economic development but in human rights and the rights of other living things.

Note: there will be more on this story. My old buddy Ted Cartselos did another shoot, with a better camera, on Friday. (Thanks, Ted, for working with me on this.)

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, Uncategorized Tagged with , , ,

I’ve been debating with a couple of nuclear apologists on Twitter this week, following my public celebration of the permanent closing of San Onofre’s twin nukes.

My German correspondent Rainer Klute sent me to a very interesting article in Forbes, “How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt?”

The article made quite a number of valid points, including the very high death toll from unregulated coal in China—something that could be slashed quite easily just by adopting US pollution standards.

But when I got here, I had to wonder what the author had been smoking:

The dozen or so U.S. deaths in nuclear have all been in the weapons complex or are modeled from general LNT effects. The reason the nuclear number is small is that it produces so much electricity per unit.  There just are not many nuclear plants. And the two failures have been in GenII plants with old designs.  All new builds must be GenIII and higher, with passive redundant safety systems, and all must be able to withstand the worst case disaster, no matter how unlikely.

Two failures in the US nuclear sector? Off the top of my head, I can think of three major nuclear failures that could have put wide swaths of the population at risk, had there been breaches of the sort at Chernobyl and Fukushima: Enrico Fermi in Michigan, 1966; Browns Ferry, Alabama, 1975; and of course, Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979. And I knew there were plenty more, so I did some searching. A list of nuclear accidents at https://pec.putney.net/issue_detail.php?ID=18 lists at least 59 incidents in the US. 59 times that could have led to calamity!

While Gen III designs, with several new layers of redundancy, are clearly superior to the Gen II, they are untried, and some scientists have serious concerns about their safety:

Other engineers, although not outright saying that they are not safer, are more conservative and have some specific concerns. Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has challenged specific cost-saving design choices made for two generation III reactors, both the AP1000 and ESBWR. Lyman, John Ma (a senior structural engineer at the NRC), and Arnold Gundersen (an anti-nuclear consultant) are concerned about what they perceive as weaknesses in the steel containment vessel and the concrete shield building around the AP1000. They say that the AP1000 containment vessel does not have sufficient safety margins in the event of a direct airplane strike.[3][4]

And let’s not forget that the Generation II plants were themselves a reaction to (and supposed improvement over) safety flaws in the old Generation I series.

Also, for all the talk about withstanding the worst-case disaster, let’s not forget that humans have often drastically underestimated the power to create havoc. Nobody thought that a tsunami would breach the seawalls at Fukushima. No one thought New Orleans would be flooded not by Hurricane Katrina flooding the Mississippi, but by the storm’s breech of the levee holding back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain.

Oddly enough, my discussion with Mr. Klute had mostly been on the question of the carbon impact of nuclear, and my contention that all the many steps in the fuel cycle, starting with mining, have a significant carbon footprint. But the Forbes piece didn’t address the issue, and that conversation will have to wait for another day.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Technology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Anybody else out there hate robocalls and refuse to do business with them?

I’m a self-described “publicity slut.” I average well over 100 media publicity placements per year. I spend a lot of time reading and responding to reporter queries, posting to discussion lists, commenting on blogs, participating in social media, etc., etc., and I recommend these tactics to my clients and to the readers of my books on marketing. And I actually get some very good clients from free listings.

So why do I hang up on all the robocalls that greet me with “press 1 to update your free listing” (and I seem to get several of these robocalls every week)?

For a whole bunch of reasons. Here are seven among many examples:

  1. I don’t know who the company is. There is no greeting on these robocalls, just the command. I have no idea who they are, whether they have a pre-existing relationship with me, what kind of reputation it has, and whether anyone uses this database.
  2. I don’t know if the company using the robocalls even has a public database, or if the robocalls are just a scammy way to gather information for nefarious purposes.
  3. There’s no clue about how easy or hard it will be to update this listing. Will it take me two minutes…or two hours? There’s no way to ask the robocall.
  4. Since the update is by phone, accuracy is a concern.
  5. I am sure there’s going to be an ask for money somewhere, and I don’t want to invest (potentially) a whole lot of time only to find out that I’m not eligible because, for instance, I don’t choose to buy a copy of the directory for several hundred dollars. I have learned from hard experience that free often comes with a catch, and free via robocalls will be pretty much guaranteed to have a catch.
  6. I also don’t want to proceed down this road without knowing the real price or any other terms and conditions.
  7. And the biggest reason of all: if you are trying to sell me something, I want contact with a human being who can answer my questions; robocalls don’t cut it in my world.

From one marketer to another, I have to ask: why are you running up your phone bill with this useless, wasted marketing?

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