By Posted on Posted in Other, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

On Facebook, someone named Fabienne Marthol asked,torn money on stairs-screenshot

“A child ripped up their allowance because it wasn’t the amount his mom Said she would give him. She walked out her room and saw this [for screenshot of the picture she posted, look left]. What would you do? Not how you would feel, but what exactly would you do if this was your child’s behavior?”

The post, made one week ago, was picked up by MarketWatch. It went viral, with 13,660 Likes and 37,734 Shares.

As a journalist, I have a certain degree of skepticism about the whole thing. I know how hard it is to tear up recent US currency, and don’t think too many kids could have even done this. It’s not like ripping up a piece of notebook paper. I also question the absence of any explanation for why the mom didn’t keep her promise.

And I have to wonder what kind of parent thinks the kid needs an allowance of that magnitude—I got fifty cents and, eventually, a dollar a week through high school, which would work out to perhaps $5 to $10 in today’s money. Combined with the bus pass I had to get to school, it was adequate for my needs. My mom, who was far from wealthy, covered my housing (a room in her apartment), medical costs, and food eaten or made in the house. The allowance was for the treats I wanted in my life: a meal out, an occasional concert ticket. I’d assume that this kid’s parents are also covering the basics.

But never mind all that. What really appalls me is the number of people responding on both Facebook and Marketwatch advocating variations on beating the crap out of the ungrateful kid. And one thing I don’t question is that the reader comments are genuine.

Surely we know by now that violence only creates seething latent violence that will come out, maybe years later, against some other innocent. And overreactive violence, even more so. I still remember reeling not from the blow but from the injustice when I got spanked for something one of my sisters had done. (Spankings were rare in our house, but they did happen occasionally.) It would have been very easy to internalize that as rage. Luckily, I internalized it instead as a need to strive for justice—one of sevral catalyzing moments that created the activist I became.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering. If it had been my kid (assuming the parent had some valid reason for shorting the kid and breaking the promise), I’d have said something on the order of “if that’s how you choose to spend your allowance, that’s your decision. If the broken promise was not justifiable, I might have made up the shortfall but in a way that did not reward the behavior—and certainly would not have replaced the ruined money.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

hazardous waste site167218_9505NOT an April Fools joke: a year-long government forensic investigation found that a nuclear waste drum explosion at Los Alamos was caused by a chemical reaction with the carbohydrates in the wheat-based kitty litter it was packed in. This accident on February 14, 2014 released radiation into the environment and caused the state of New Mexico to impose large fines on the federal government. But the feds are refusing to pay.

Worse, there are 678 more drums packed with the same kitty litter, and it doesn’t look like the people at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) have any plans to proactively do something about it.

Since it’s in the public domain, I’m reprinting William Boardman’s article where I found out about this. It originally ran on Reader Supported News.

But first—Boardman asks, “Was LANL cutting safety corners to cut costs?”

I think he’s totally wrong about why this kitty litter was chosen. As a cat owner who used to use clay cat liter and now uses organic ones, I think I can shed some light on that. And I think the implications for nuclear policy worldwide need to be pointed out.

Here’s my take on what happened:

  • LANL’s instructions on packing the waste are probably decades old. At the time they were likely to have been written, clay kitty litter was all there was. The numerous plant-based kitty litters are a recent invention. So they specified “kitty litter” rather than “inert kitty letter composed of clay or rock” because this was not an issue when it was written.
  • Anyone who has used both can tell you the organic kitty litters are far more absorbent. They typically cost MORE than clay litters, so cost clearly was not the issue.
  • Because they’re flushable, they’re marketed as environmentally friendly.
  • So, someone who didn’t happen to be a chemist but was aware that these litters absorb more (and possibly was also motivated to do something for the environment) was in charge of procuring, and of course went for the litter seen as more effective and green.

In other words, that part was 99% likely an honest mistake, and the major human error was in the failure to update the storage regulations. The failure to deal with the remaining 678 drums, however, is criminal stupidity and should be dealt with before there are more explosions.

What this means for policy

–>BUT the whole problem with the nuclear industry is that it relies on a world where human error doesn’t happen. Unfortunately, human error happens constantly. Not only that, but this situation shows a major communication failure in just a few decades.

But  exploding kitty litter is the least of it. The instructions we pass on about how to “safely” store nuclear waste need to last 250,000 years! That’s how long it takes plutonium to become mostly inert (it never goes away completely). Not only have we never built a container that has lasted a quarter of a million years, we’ve never had a language that long. We are making an assumption that future generations will be able to understand our instructions and replace the storage drums when they wear out. Meanwhile, we’re bombarding them with highly radioactive waste that shortens their lifespan. Radwaste has this tendency to embrittle and corrode things.

Factor in accidents (far more prevalent than most people realize; there have been more than 100 significant nuclear accidents), security concerns, environmental consequences of the entire fuel cycle. Every one of these provides the potential of grave human error with catastrophic results. Large areas of the Ukraine are still sealed off after Chernobyl, almost 30 years ago.

Now add in nuclear’s wretched economics, and the availability of safer, cheaper, cleaner renewable energy resources. We have absolutely no need to go down this road.  And developing nuclear power may turn out to be the second-worst act of hubris in our very hubristic history; the first is nuclear power’s older brother: nuclear weapons.

Japan, one of the most nuclearized countries in the world (and sorely lacking in many other energy sources), managed pretty well without its nukes when they were shut down after Fukushima. Many countries have banned or started to phase out nukes, including Germany, Italy, and Belgium. Isn’t it time the rest of the world joined them?

Here’s Boardman’s article:

Kitty Litter Shuts Down Sole US Nuclear Weapons Waste Facility
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
07 April 15
More links at original site:

https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/29496-focus-kitty-litter-shuts-down-sole-us-nuclear-weapons-waste-facility

U.S. nuclear weapons buildup ignores waste dangers

Now it’s official: using the wrong kitty litter can cause a severe and expensive nuclear accident at the nation’s unique underground radioactive waste containment facility, shutting it down indefinitely. <https://energy.gov/em/downloads/technical-assessment-team-report>

What’s NOT official yet is why the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) used organic kitty litter that caused the nuclear waste accident in the first place, or why LANL used that kitty litter in some 678 other drums of radioactive nuclear weapons waste now located at LANL and other locations. It’s also NOT official that the wrong kitty litter was deliberately and deceitfully used for more than a year. Nor is it yet clear why the federal government, having violated New Mexico environmental laws, refuses to pay the state $54 million in fines for federal law-breaking.

Last winter, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) appointed a Technical Assessment Team of independent experts from other government labs, and the team spent most of a year investigating the 2014 Valentine’s Day radiation-release accident at New Mexico’s federal Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP). On March 26, 2015, the team produced a 277-page report that concluded that radiation was released from the facility when a single container (Drum 68660) over-heated and failed because the nuclear weapons waste it contained was packed with the wrong kind of kitty litter. That kitty litter was “chemically incompatible” with the other contents of the drum, causing it to overheat, creating gases that forced open the lid in a “thermal runaway” that led to the spill that released radiation to the environment and that still renders a large section of the underground storage area lethal to humans.

The assessment team concluded that the February 14, 2014, drum failure took about 70 days to develop before the drum was breached. The accident released radioactive isotopes of Uranium, Plutonium, and Americium in uncertain amounts that are officially thought to be relatively small. As of early April 2015, Drum 68660 is the only drum that has failed. The experts determined that there were other containers in which radioactive waste was packed with the wrong kitty litter, and that any of these might fail, although they say they believe another failure is unlikely.

In part because the accident site remains largely inaccessible, the assessment team wrote that it “could not determine the cause of the drum breach with absolute certainty.”

Los Alamos National Laboratory’s multiple radiation risks continue

While most of the drums of nuclear weapons waste laden with organic kitty litterare already underground at WIPP, there are an estimated 113 in temporary storage in Texas and 57 remaining at LANL. One of the drums at LANL is a “sibling drum” to the one that burst underground. The two drums were packed with waste from the same “parent drum” and with the same Swheat Scoop kitty litter, but other elements of their contents were slightly different. The drum still at LANL is monitored for heat and remains intact. LANL has shipped more than 1,000 drums of waste to WIPP since it opened in 1999. Remaining LANL waste stored above ground on-site was threatened by wildfire in 2011 and remains near an earthquake fault line.

The DOE assessment team did not address the question of why the waste packing process at Los Alamos stopped using non-organic kitty litter as usual and switched to Swheat Scoop. The World Nuclear Association, an industry group in London, explains the kitty litter mix-up by saying: “The DOE did not specify its preferred brand…. However, SwheatScoop happens to be made from wheat and therefore contains carbohydrates which provided fuel for a chemical reaction with the metal nitrate salts being disposed of.” Each 55-gallon drum of nuclear waste typically includes about 50 pounds of kitty litter.

Rumors that the accident at WIPP was caused by the wrong kitty litter used by LANL surfaced soon after it happened. In May 2014, New Mexico’s Environment Department secretary, Ryan Flynn, issued a formal order to LANL to secure the drums with the wrong kitty litter, saying in part:

Based on the evidence presented to NMED, the current handling, storage, treatment and transportation of the hazardous nitrate salt bearing waste containers at LANL may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment.

Was LANL cutting safety corners to cut costs?

In November 2014, after a six-month investigation, the Santa Fe New Mexican portrayed LANL as behaving either incompetently, or with reckless disregard for safety, or with something like criminal negligence – perhaps a mixture of all three. Motivating LANL malfeasance, the paper suggests, was the desire of the private contractors running the lab to meet the June 30, 2014, deadline for clearing waste from the site, thereby protecting and extending its $2.2 billion annual operating contract with the U.S. Energy Department as well as another $80 million a year for managing LANL.

Like so much of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, LANL is a cozy, profitable, corporate-welfare monopoly for a private consortium calling itself Los Alamos National Security. The Delaware Limited Liability Company was formed eight years ago by four entities: Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services, URS Energy and Construction, Bechtel, and the University of California. As stated in its by-laws, the company purpose is “to manage and operate the Los Alamos National Laboratory in a manner that furthers the interests of the national security and advances the DOE/NNSA missions, programs and objectives in accordance with the terms of the Prime Contract.” In other words, it is a privately held national security profit center that, according to Bloomberg, “engages in the businesses of nuclear defense programs, facilities management, science and technology to homeland security challenges, and safety and security.”

Los Alamos National Security LLC is, by its very nature, a limited liability conflict of interest in which at least one conflict is between profit and security.

Santa Fe New Mexican lays out tough case against LANL

As viewed by the New Mexican, the parent company, Los Alamos National Security, allowed its employees at LANL to take numerous actions that could protect the company’s profits by risking the security of others. The gambit appears to have failed by just one drum. Its elements, perpetrated or allowed by LANL employees or contractors, included, according to the New Mexican:

• … workers packaging the waste came across a batch that was extraordinarily acidic, making it unsafe for shipping. The lab’s guidelines called for work to shut down while the batch underwent a rigid set of reviews to determine how to treat it, a time-consuming process that jeopardized the lab’s goal of meeting the deadline. Instead, the lab and its various contractors took shortcuts in treating the acidic nuclear waste, adding neutralizer and a wheat-based organic kitty litter to absorb excess liquid.

• Documents accompanying the drum, which were supposed to include a detailed description of its contents … made no mention of the acidity or the neutralizer, and they mischaracterized the kitty litter as a clay-based material – not the more combustible organic variety that most chemists would have recognized as hazardous if mixed with waste laden with nitrate salts….

• Documents and internal emails show that even after the radiation leak, lab officials downplayed the dangers of the waste – even to the Carlsbad managers whose staff members were endangered by its presence – and withheld critical information from regulators and WIPP officials investigating the leak.

• The waste container that ultimately burst would not have met federal transportation standards to get on the road from Los Alamos to Carlsbad, nor would it have been accepted at WIPP, if its true ingredients had been reported by the lab.

• In documents filed with the New Mexico Environment Department before the accident, LANL reported that the waste in the drum that would later burst “is stable and will not undergo violent chemical change without detonating,” and “there is no indication that the waste contains explosive materials, and it is not capable of detonation or explosive reaction. The materials in the waste stream are therefore not reactive wastes.

• LANL has never publicly acknowledged the reason it switched from clay-based litter to the organic variety believed to be the fuel that fed the intense heat.

• Organic kitty litter may have been mixed in up to 5,565 containers of waste at LANL starting in September 2012 that were incorrectly labeled as holding inorganic litter, according to an assessment conducted by WIPP personnel.
LANL did not respond to inquiries by RSN seeking an explanation for the change from inorganic to organic kitty litter during 2012-2014.

Commenting on the story in the New Mexican, Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group wrote in part: “The treatment processes LANS [the LLC] used were illegal as well as dangerous. Shipping the waste was illegal. Providing the fallacious manifest that accompanied the drums was illegal. Failing to provide accurate information after the fact when NMED asks for it was and is illegal.”

In the most recent study group bulletin, Mello notes that not every misdeed in the nuclear world will reach the public and cites an example from December 2014 when eight people at LANL were apparently contaminated with Plutonium but there was no news coverage.

Nuclear safety is an expensive mirage, all for the sake of nuclear war

The cost of failure of the single drum contaminated with organic kitty litter will almost surely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. WIPP alone estimates its recovery plan will cost at least $500 million, and an additional $200 million or so for an improved, new ventilation system. These estimates do not include the additional costs of holding the nuclear waste stream while WIPP is closed, or the cost of improvement and compliance at LANL or any other facility.

When it opened in 1999, WIPP was supposed to have a 10,000 year leak-proof design life protecting the public from nuclear weapons waste radiation. That design life turned out to be only 15 years of safety, although further releases of radiation since Valentine’s Day 2014 have apparently been limited.

The Department of Energy says it is committed to reopening WIPP by March 2016, at least for partial operation, but that’s uncertain, since no one has ever tried to fix an underground nuclear waste facility before. Meanwhile, the ceiling of the underground salt cave had a significant collapse in January, when a section of ceiling 8 feet by 8 feet and two feet thick fell in a non-contaminated section of the one square mile storage area. As WIPP management acknowledged at the time: “This event highlights the need to continue prioritizing roof bolting and ground control in both the contaminated and uncontaminated areas of the WIPP underground facility in order to ensure safety and habitability in the underground. This area was originally scheduled to be re-bolted during the annual outage in February 2014.”

In March, more than a year after Drum 68660 burst, decontamination of the underground area began, as reported by WIPP: “Employees are using a modified piece of agricultural spraying equipment that allows them to apply a fine water mist to the walls and floor. The water dissolves the salt and washes it down to the floor. When the salt recrystallizes, it encapsulates the contamination and prevents any resuspension of radioactive particles.”

And now the federal government has reversed its past practice of paying fines for violating state laws and regulations. In December 2014, New Mexico’s Environment Department levied a total of $54 million in fines on the federal (outsourced) operations at WIPP ($17.7 million) and LANL ($36.6 million). Now the Energy Department is taking the position that it would be illegal to pay New Mexico’s fines, even though it has done so in the past. New Mexico is reportedly preparing a new order against WIPP, LANL, and others with fines totaling $100 million.

Underlying this struggle over the safety of nuclear weapons waste is the Obama administration’s perpetuation of longstanding reliance on a massive nuclear weapons force comprising more than 7,500 warheads, more than 2,000 of which are presently deployed around the world. The Obama administration has embarked on a program of improving and expanding the American nuclear force. A key element of that program is the fabrication of Plutonium pits (nuclear bomb triggers).

Making these essential elements of American weapons of mass destruction has been assigned to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, even though LANL has demonstrated its ability and willingness to gamble on lying about using the wrong kitty litter.

——————————

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind--Book Cover
The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind–Book Cover
The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: How to Rewire Your Brain and Your Business for Success, by Valeh Nazemoff (CA Technologies, 2014), reviewed by Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green

According to the Nazemoff, any successful business needs to concentrate on four different types of intelligence.

The first is financial intelligence, which most people already think about when they think about business.

But we also have to think about customer intelligence, data intelligence, mastermind intelligence. Mastermind is really what we normally think of as brainstorming. It’s the idea that a group of people can be smarter than any one individual.

In data intelligence, she suggests marrying the “9 Cs”—Collaborate, Consolidate, Communicate, Collect, Connect, Coordinate, Change, Converse, and Convert—to the classic 5Ws and an H that every beginning journalist learns to ask: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How.

Combining these, we get what she calls neuro-economics. And sometimes, small incremental changes that create a big result.

To me, the most interesting chapter was on customer intelligence. She talks about how to develop a customer profile, personas, and markets. and how to use this information to create communities. But she also shed some fascinating light on data. Specifically, the importance of determining whether your data is good. And I love her statement that success is not about how much data you have, but whether you have the right data.

These intelligences have implications in decision-making; Nazemoff talks about using them to determine who is responsible to make the decision, who is accountable, who gets consulted, and who simply gets informed.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, localism/locavore, poverty, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,
Whole grain cracker (stock photo, not the brand I'm writing about)
Whole grain cracker (stock photo, not the brand I’m writing about)

In the next town over, there’s a store I frequent that sells remaindered natural foods. I bought some whole-grain rye crackers there recently, costing 99 cents for an 8.8 ounce package. Yesterday I noticed this astonishing bit of small print on the label:

Made in England from local and imported ingredients…Imported and distributed by [address in Australia] and [address in New Zealand].

Our nearest full-scale international airport is in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, about 100 miles away. Googling the distances, it’s about 20,000 miles from England to Boston via either Australia or New Zealand.

The cracker label does something very odd about  ingredients: wholegrain rye flour and salt are listed, and then—presumably because they’re recycling the same back panel across several flavor varieties—”May Contain Oats (Gluten), Wheat (Gluten), Sesame Seeds, Soya.” It’s a fair guess that at least the sesame (definitely included in this flavor) and soy traveled an additional few thousand miles to get to the factory in England.

Mind you, I’m not a locavore purist. Yes, I prefer to eat local, but I’ve got plenty of olive oil, chocolate, and other products in my kitchen that don’t grow around here. But when there is a local product available, I prefer to buy it. Years ago, I stopped buying the very wonderful bread I used to get because it’s made in California, and there’s perfectly lots of good bread made within 10 miles of my house—and I’ve basically only bought locally baked bread since then. (I did buy a loaf of my old favorite when I was in Berkeley, where it was local.)

Grains can be grown in my area, and some of the local bakeries actually use local ingredients (including a tortillaria that uses local, organic heirloom corn, and their tortillas are delicious).

It should not even be possible that something could travel 3/4 of the way around the world, be sold to me at that price, and have anyone involved make a profit. The shipping costs alone have to be much higher than that. And if externalities were counted and the true costs figured in, I should have been looking at a price tag somewhere around $10.

In the privileged middle-class country where I live, the impact is somewhat modulated, because only a small percentage of people make their living as farmers, and many of those farmers have secured markets that are insulated from these kinds of macroeconomics games (farmers markets, specialty restaurants, etc.). But talk to any dairy farmer in the US, and you’ll find that the economics are very troubling.

And when imports are dumped below-cost into subsistence farm economies in developing countries, the results can be tragic. Farmers who cannot compete with these artificially low prices lose their markets, and eventually their land. They crowd themselves into massive urban slums where they can find menial jobs, and those overcrowded megacities become crime-invested nightmares—while the land they once farmed withers or is polluted by some big industrial scheme where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced because it’s cheaper to operate in countries without strong environmental regulations.

We need to rethink our food economics and our whole consumer economy. Desperately.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, General Commentary, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Starbucks has been getting a lot of flack since announcing its “Race Together” initiative. People are mostly either calling the company self-serving or questioning why a cafe chain would want to take on an agenda that seems so unrelated to its core business.

Now, I’ve certainly criticized companies for cause marketing that seems to have nothing to do with its purpose. For example, I’ve publicly questioned why Ford has chosen to support a breast cancer charity rather than something related to, say, transportation access.

And I’ve given space to Starbucks critics like Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans, who says the coffee giant could be doing a lot more on sustainability, fair trade, and organic.

But I actually think this time Starbucks did something sensible and good, and I was really pretty shocked at the negative media firestorm.

Consider this:

  • In the post-Ferguson climate, where black communities are showing righteous anger about police violence, race is back on the agenda
  • Many legislative bodies are imposing onerous barriers to registering and voting, ostensibly to stop “voter fraud” (which is close to zero)—but whose deeper agenda seems to be denying the vote to people of color and those with low incomes
  • As a culture, when we want to talk things over, we do so over coffee—so what better place to start a national conversation?
  • Starbucks has thousands of locations in cities—Ground Zero for the recent race incidents; thus, the company has a vested interest in de-escalating tensions and opening dialog so those stores continue to thrive, in addition to the moral grounds it cites

While writing the message “Race together” on cups ends today, Starbucks continues to see fostering dialog on race as a priority. In a public letter yesterday to the company’s employees, CEO Howard Schultz wrote,

We have a number of planned Race Together activities in the weeks and months to come: more partner open forums, three more special sections co-produced with USA TODAY over the course of the next year, more open dialogue with police and community leaders in cities across our country, a continued focus on jobs and education for our nation’s young people plus our commitment to hire 10,000 opportunity youth over the next three years, expanding our store footprint in urban communities across the country, and new partnerships to foster dialogue and empathy and help bridge the racial and ethnic divides within our society that have existed for so many years…The heart of Race Together has always been about humanity: the promise of the American Dream should be available to every person in this country, not just a select few.  We leaned in because we believed that starting this dialogue is what matters most.  We are learning a lot. And will always aim high in our efforts to make a difference on the issues that matter most.

If this is self-serving, I say we need more of that kind of self-serving.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Much as I would love to see a Bernie Sanders presidency, I don’t think he should run. Why? This comment I wrote in response to a Facebook “fantasy” (her word) of a Sanders-Elizabeth Warren ticket explains succinctly:

Fantasies? Absolutely. Elections? Not so much–and I say this as someone who has voted for Nader and Kucinich and who feels Bernie Sanders represents me as well as Vermonters. We need them both in the Senate where they can actually work for change, and not marginalized as 3% presidential candidates who can be safely ignored or ridiculed. Oh, and Elizabeth Warren (who IS my Senator) needs to get off the Israel-right-or-wrong train.

Now, if we had instant runoff, parliamentary democracy instead of winner-take-all and some other much-needed reforms, it would be different. But right now, the system is totally stacked in favor of forcing us to vote for the least horrible mainstream candidate instead of the most wonderful fringe people. 20 years ago, I was excited at the idea that the day would come when I could vote for Hillary–but she was a different person then.

Among the other reforms we need is in campaign finance. It’s an absolute travesty that we allow our candidates to be bought and sold, and force them to spend so much time fundraising. We also need to look at the often-ridiculous way congressional district lines are drawn. The way we let candidates buy attack ads without proving their facts. And the way we allow TV to control the discourse in ways that restrict real discussion of real issues.

With those additional reforms, perhaps we’d get a viable party that actually stands for the people’s interest—or the planet’s. In Europe, which has a parliamentary system and a different way to fund elections, Green Party candidates often win seats and most countries have been governed by people-centered democratic governments. And, perhaps not by coincidence, things like health care and college education and maternity leave are considered fundamental rights. Meanwhile, we’re stuck with Tweedlebad and Tweedlehorrible.

Meanwhile, please, let’s keep Bernie and Elizabeth in the Senate.

That’s my opinion. Please put yours in the comments.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized

cover of the book, Creative Anarchy
Creative Anarchy cover (green side)
For a non-visual learner like me, Creative Anarchy is a mind expander. The author has brought together ideas from design studios around the world, many of which offer very non-traditional approaches.

The book has two key principles. The first is that rules are made to be broken. The second is that in order to break the rules, you must understand them.

For example, a common rule in book publishing is that books have both a front and a back. However, this book has two fronts. The larger, green, side is more or less about the rules. The thinner, red, side is about breaking those rules.

It makes fascinating reading.

However, as someone who occasionally hires graphic artists, I find that I generally insist on two rules that only get lip service here. First, I believe that it is usually important to write copy before considering the design. And secondly, I believe that any visual representation should enhance the message. Some of her examples do this beautifully and creatively, while others left me scratching my head and saying huh?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Eco-friendly, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
Value is about not just price, but quality. This busy market obviously understands.
If you want to market on price, look at words like “affordable” and “value.” “Cheap” can be deadly.

As a service provider, I did lead on price for a number of years. Back in the days when much of my business was resume writing, I used a simple half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages (remember them?) with the slogan “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” The year they changed it without permission to “Affordable professional resumes while U wait,” I successfully argued that proper grammar was a key selling point in my line of work and they killed it—and got the cost of the whole year’s ad refunded. I turned out to be wrong; that ad brought me plenty of clients. But I personally would not patronize a writing service whose face to the world was ungrammatical.

Those ads ran in the 1980s and 1990s, and resume writing is only a tiny fraction of my current business. These days, I stress value, not price–for all the services I offer. Some are still quite inexpensive, like writing a press release or book cover—or, for that matter, the occasional resume I still write. Others, including strategic consulting on green and social change profitability as well as book publishing consulting, can be fairly pricy.

I would have moved away from marketing on low price anyway, as my business matured. But if I hadn’t, my business would have dried up. The market is very different now. Nobody is a prisoner of their own geography any more. I can’t compete on price with some clown on a bottom-feeding service bidding site who throws an article into a word-blender and spits out crap for $5 a shot. But I sure can compete on value and quality.

As a consumer, I’m price-sensitive on some items, but quality will trump price, and so will politics. Yesterday, I spent $40 or $50 at the farmers market. I could have bought the (theoretically) same items at a supermarket for half the price, but not the organic/local/fresh choices I purchased. But I also stopped at the local independent discount store and picked up some just-past-date polenta for a buck. I cooked it last night and it was fine. I have a less gourmet one in my fridge that I paid $3 for at a different store and it doesn’t expire until November, which means the one I ate tonight was probably packed last summer. But that’s OK, it was fine.

I learned all the way back in the 1980s that price and value were not necessarily the same. After a couple of bad experiences with cheap electronics, I started buying better quality components for my stereo, better telephones, and so forth—and being much happier with my purchases. I learned that I could get a good deal through a remainder catalog, and that a $100 item with an original list price of $300 was generally going to be a much better value than a $75 item that had never sold for more than $100. And when I bought my first computer, I went with the expensive but easy-to-use Macintosh and was very happy I did.

I will shop at that local discount store, but I won’t shop at that very famous low-price big box store beginning with a W. While I recognize that they are among the best in the industry on sustainability (something very important to me), I’m also painfully aware of how much I dislike their store siting and closing policies, their community relations, labor practices, supplier practices, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, I’ve heard that the quality is often less than stellar. I give them kudos in my speeches for, among other things, developing a massive market for organic foods among people who have never been inside a Whole Foods. But I personally choose not to shop there.

But I’m perfectly happy to drive inexpensive, functional cars. Right now, we have a 2004 Mazda, bought new for $17K, and a 2005 Toyota Corolla, bought at six years old but with only 26,000 miles on it, for $10K. I expect both to last several more years. When we bought the Corolla, one of our other options was a used Prius with 99,000 miles, for $12K. The Corolla seemed like a MUCH better deal. It wasn’t the lower price so much as having only 1/4 as many miles.

In short, as a consumer, I’ll definitely factor in price, but it won’t be the only factor. How about you? As a business owner and as a consumer, how does price factor into your decisions.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Today, I encountered a post from an Internet friend who lives in Israel, urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netenyahu to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.

The post made me feel queasy. My original response was a desire to scream and yell that this was racist. Fortunately, I had enough self-control not to give into that stupid and unproductive urge. I also didn’t want to start a firestorm of negative attacks on me because I had the temerity to disagree with a view that I felt was both racist and extremist. And yet I wanted to confront this way of thinking and not let it go unchallenged.

So instead, I thought for a couple of minutes about what type of response would actually be heard and not blocked out—what could actually advance a dialog. (I will confess that I haven’t always been skilled in that type of response, but I think I’ve gotten much better in the past several years.

And this is what I finally wrote—knowing that my friend is deeply religious, and that an appeal to his religious convictions might actually get through.

Even as poor a student of the Torah as I am knows that God does not want to see innocent blood shed. Your recipe for Bibi would leave hundreds of thousands dead and the Middle East–including Israel–in flames. Possibly the entire world. I urge you to think carefully about unintended consequences.

And amazingly enough, this actually did open a door for some mild and thoughtful dialog. Not a perfect outcome but one I could feel reasonably good about. I had used the marketing principles I teach, and given the right message for the audience.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life, travel Tagged with , ,

The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance
The famous globe at the Epcot Center entrance
On my fifth trip to Orlando, staying 3 miles from the Walt Disney World entrance, I figured it was time. So I arranged for press comps and spent half a day at Epcot (the logical park for someone into both travel and outer space). I had low expectations, but the experience fell so far below those low expectations it was shameful.

I’d always thought that the travel half of Epcot attempted to recreate the experience of being in many different parts of the world. They featured exactly 11 countries, eight of which I’d been to. Nine of those 11 were exclusively about shopping and eating. Two actually had an educational exhibit (one of which, in the Japan pavilion, was quite well done but only took about 30 minutes to go through the whole thing). We did catch one excellent performance by a Chinese dance troupe. On the space side, the simulated space ride was excellent, but the rest of it was pretty mediocre, and the lines were very long. And considering that almost all the space exhibits had corporate sponsors, you’d think they could do something about the very high admission fees.

I’d experienced a similar space simulation 40 miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, a much more interesting park overall, and considerably cheaper, to boot. In fact, we liked Kennedy so much, we went back the next day to see the parts we’d missed. If you’re going to Orlando and you’ve got a personality like mine, it’s a better bet.

The whole experience made me very grateful that neither of my kids ever showed any interest in going to Disney. They’d much rather come with us to places like Denmark, Italy, and California (we live in Massachusetts).

Real places, in other words. Disney is a marketing machine that has very little to do with recreating reality.

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