Whale of a fail, pure silly fun
Anyone old enough to remember the classic Disney film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?
Got a whale of a FAIL to tell ya lads,
A whale of a FAIL or two
‘Bout the flying birds and tweeting herds
Of days and nights with endless nerds
A whale of a FAIL and it’s all true
I swear at FriendFeed too.
There was the robot all broken up
Upside down birds, no more tweeting
Was the romance poor? Was it 404?
Maybe it was simply fleeting.
Got a whale of a FAIL to tell ya now,
A whale of a FAIL or two
‘Bout the flying birds and tweeting herds
140 letters and real short words
A whale of a FAIL and it’s all true
Looks like Jaiku is down too.
You’ve hit the limit, no more follows
Can’t tell the world your sorrows
Your status blog updates rings hollow
Never mind, we’ll try again tomorrow
Got a whale of a FAIL to tell ya girls,
A whale of a FAIL or two
‘Bout the flying birds and tweeting herds
A business model would be absurd
A whale of a FAIL and it’s all true
At least the whale is cute.
The original:
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Why does Coca-Cola screw over schools in My Coke Rewards?
We drink a lot of soda here at the office, since we have a volume deal with a local distributor, one of the many benefits of working at the Student Loan Network. As a result, I collect and redeem a LOT of bottle caps for the My Coke Rewards program. One of my favorite things, of course, is to donate Reward Points to helpful causes, but recently, I was looking at the regular rewards vs. the school rewards programs, and I’ve noticed a distinct sense of unfairness – to help schools, it felt like you had to redeem far more points per material good than in the regular program.
Not being satisfied with a vague feeling, I decided to do a little comparison shopping, and worked up the following spreadsheet.
Notes: PPD is points per dollar. As much as possible, I tried to stick to real world pricing engines like Amazon and Google Checkout, and tried to pick the item depicted in the My Coke Rewards interface in the comparison shopping engines.
Click here for the full version.
My suspicions were not only confirmed, but the magnitude of unfairness is 3.5x – a school item on average is 3.5x more costly in terms of reward points to real world value than the regular giveaway items.
So what gives, Coke? I would think if you’re trying to build goodwill, items in the school channel program would be CHEAPER on a points per dollar basis than regular items, rather than 3.5x more expensive. Is this simply a way of saying that people are suckers when it comes to supporting charity and can’t do math? Or is this saying that Coke would rather hand out trinkets to consumers directly than throw greater financial support to educational programs? (that’s what the numbers say)
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The solution to the offshore drilling question…
… is surprisingly simple.
Open up the protected reserves we have to offshore drilling. They are our natural resources, after all, and better we should rely on our resources in the short term than on other nations, particularly nation-states not friendly to us.
Then nationalize the production – i.e. cut out ExxonMobil (ticker: XOM) and the other energy companies.
Nationalize it, use it as a jobs program to create lots of additional jobs that out of work Americans need.
Nationalize it, and divert all the profits from $140/barrel oil to the national debt. Don’t subcontract out to the private sector and push profits to private industry which clearly does not need them. Yes, they may have expertise, but so what? Hire away their experts.
There are, by some estimates, 28 billion barrels of oil out there that are currently under moratorium.
At $100/barrel, significantly under today’s prices, you’re talking enough money to destroy 20% of the national debt.
Open up, drill, create jobs for Americans, nationalize the profits, and use a limited natural resource to start freeing future generations of Americans from the debts we’ve created.
I’d like to think this proposal gets the most out of our limited resources. More jobs for Americans, money for energy staying in America instead of going overseas, profits from oil going not to the private sector which shouldn’t get a dime, but to the national debt.
Disclosure: I’m thoroughly unqualified to be speaking on the topic. Never took geology, don’t know a thing about oil production beyond the basics of refining, and never studied economics. That puts me at roughly the same level of expertise as your elected representatives.
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Rich Meals for Poor Times
The challenge is on. If you want to MAKE something useful as part of a new media experiment, join Rich Meals for Poor Times, a project we’re doing as part of the practical application part of PodCamp Philly. Contribute recipes, ideas, resources, etc. and let’s see if we can’t achieve some amazing results!
Throwing down a challenge to PodCamp Philly
I’ve been reading some very insightful comments about PodCamp Boston 3 over the past few days, and this one from Chris Cavallari really stuck out.
I especially liked this:
In my talks with other podcampers, one of the issues that came out of PCB3 was the desire to actually create something at Podcamp. At this point, many of us are veterans of podcamps and new/social media, and are looking to expand our horizons. The sessions, while mostly interesting and informative, are generally rehashes of things we’ve seen and done for several years now. Many of us want some kind of track where we can physically put the skills we’ve learned and honed to good use.
Here is the challenge that faces America right now – people are making hard choices between gasoline and food, between college and electricity, between losing their house and losing their life.
We can’t do much at a single PodCamp to influence global policy, not yet. We can attempt to keep the carbon footprint of PodCamp as small as possible, as PodCamp SA did. We can’t influence ExxonMobil or the other energy companies directly yet, though new media folks are starting to work their ways into the blue chips.
What can we do?
Two things are squeezing the average Joe right now – food and fuel.
Here’s the social media challenge for PodCamp Philly, appropriate for the city of Brotherly Love, Geno’s, Pat’s, and some of the worst poverty I’ve seen in an American city.
Let’s make a social media cookbook that we can complete and distribute by the time PodCamp Philly is over. The focus? Making food as affordable as possible.
I’m reminded to say that this is open to everyone, not just people attending PodCamp Philly.
What might this entail? Between now and the close of PodCamp Philly, find, create, revise, and publish recipes using the lowest cost foodstuffs available that still satisfy basic nutritional needs and don’t resemble gruel. Use social media and real life connections to talk to a grandparent that got by during the Depression. Find old wives’ recipes and dig up ideas from old church community books. Dig deep into your community and history to find the treasures hiding just out of sight, like how to make popcorn on a stovetop or jam from scratch. How to bake a loaf of bread yourself. How to make pasta or plant an herb garden.
Let’s unite all of our networks, all of our knowledge, and all of our generations we have access to. Let’s take this information, these recipes, and blog them, with instructions and cost breakdowns. Video them and publish the videos as tutorials. Record audio walkthroughs. Let’s rip a PDF of this that can be distributed to every soup kitchen and food pantry in America, something that they can then pass on to their customers. Let’s fire up iMovie and iDVD, Libsyn and Blubrry, and make some media worth distributing. Let’s grab Chef Mark Tafoya, Jennifer Iannolo, Nina Simonds, Kathy Maister, Ming Tsai, and ask the hell out of everyone doing a cooking show in new media to help us with this goal. Let’s get Second Harvest, United Way, and every corporation with some dollars to spare to get involved and sponsor this project.
Our goal? A social media collection detailing cheap, easy, healthy food so that a parent with 5 dollars in their pocket can do at least SOMETHING other than the dollar menu at a fast food chain.
Then, at PodCamp Philly, let’s put it all together. Let’s assemble it, put up the web site, search engine optimize it, use all of our social media powers to promote the hell out of it with every service we can get our hands on, and see just how far we can lob the thing into the air.
Are you game?
I’m reminded to say that this is open to everyone, not just people attending PodCamp Philly.
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