NaBloPoMo 2010

I could blather about the midterm elections and how it’s not as bad as it could be, or about how maybe the change in the legislature will make it so Obama actually gets off his ass and does something about the one thing that all Americans can (likely) agree needs fixing. Instead, I’m going to say that apparently the first week in November is the week we should all worry about our jobs.

The first thing I did Monday morning was send a note on behalf of my employer’s Board of Directors letting staff know that BigBoss had “resigned” effective the previous Friday. I’m using quotations because from what I’ve heard from my new officemate, his resignation was a surprise to BigBoss. In some ways it shouldn’t have been and in some ways it was undeserved.

True, he did drive us into a financial ditch by spending a ton of money on things the organization didn’t really need or couldn’t make use of. Did we really need a $60,000+ all staff meeting in the spring of 2008 five months after the National Bureau of Economic Research, the organization responsible for these things in the U.S., had already declared us in a recession? On the macro level, it probably did something for staff cohesion to have everyone meet everyone else, and I’m sure the workshops were useful to many me included, but from a financial standpoint it wasn’t the smartest expenditure ever. [Read more…] about Leadership transition

I’m not normally one to pull out the political correctness yellow flag but it really annoys me when supposedly progressive groups demonstrate a certain level of thoughtlessness when it comes to their assumptions about roles in society.

I got an e-mail this morning from Breast Cancer Action, a well meaning group based in San Francisco, letting me know that they’d made the finals for “National CLASSY Award for ‘Most Effective Awareness Campaign'” for their work on pinkwashing. Pinkwashing, in case you don’t know or don’t live in the U.S., is the use of pink on their labels or the creation of special pink products made available for sale during October, which is breast cancer awareness month in the United States, by companies whose products are linked to an increase risk of breast cancer. This use of pink erroneously implies to the average, harried consumer that the company selling the product is contributing to eliminating breast cancer, or helping breast cancer patients or survivors, in some meaningful way when very often the company is doing nothing but adding a pink ribbon to a product’s label.

Breast Cancer Action is running pretty high profile campaign against KFC and the Susan G. Komen Foundation in reaction to KFC’s “Buckets for the cure” sales of fried chicken in pink buckets on the basis that unhealthy food, like KFC, is a contributing factor to developing breast cancer and that by taking KFC’s money Komen, which runs the largest breast cancer research fund raisers in the country, is allowing KFC to make a profit while giving KFC an undeserved reputation and a lot of profits they wouldn’t normally have. [Read more…] about Stay classy Stay Classy

The people at the Oxford English Dictionary always manage to surprise me. This time they’ve done it with a little campaign they call Save The Words (requires Flash).

Save The Words encourages you to adopt obsolete words to make sure they don’t become extinct. The interface for the site cleverly combines the ransom note collage concept with a lot of the same principles employed by interactive DVD menu designers. A frame that scrolls with your mouse highlights a number of words that appear to have been pasted onto a wall which, sometimes randomly sometimes when you mouseover them, by getting larger and saying phrases like “Yes, yes! Me!” “Choose me!” “No, pick me!”, a distinctly British “Oy! Oy!”, and even a plaintive “Hello?”  among others. A click of the mouse opens a definition window to tell you what your exotic word actually means and to provide you with an opportunity to register, adopt your word, and, of course, buy a t-shirt emblazoned with your new vocabulary term. [Read more…] about Save The Words

The economy, not just in the U.S. but around the world, is pretty much in the toilet. While I haven’t kept up with unemployment statistics in the EU, it’s not a stretch to imagine that people are having trouble paying their bills across the continent and that job prospects for folks who have been laid off are mighty slim right about now. What people in the U.S. may not have in common with our European counterparts is the results of the stupidity that was the housing bubble and the rampant speculation that went with it.

Two years into The Great Recession, many folks, even many who still have full-time, full-pay jobs, find themselves upside down on their mortgages. Also referred to as being “underwater,” being upside down on your mortgage means, roughly, owing more than your house is worth on the open market whether that value is determined by comparable sales or by tax assessment. The most immediate negative consequence of being upside down on your mortgage is that you can’t sell your house without having to pay the bank a ton of money you haven’t recouped in the sale of your house. The only morally upright option you have is to stay in your house and continue to make payments. This course of action is according to one LA Times reporter actually detrimental to the health of America’s economy.

This reporter’s thesis is that “…with home prices stagnant in much of the country, payments on mortgages that are underwater could absorb billions of dollars that might be used for other forms of consumer spending — a drag on family finances, the housing market and the overall economy.”¹ On its face, this seems logical: Money spent on mortgage payments is money that can’t be spent on consumer goods. But let’s unpack this and find out what’s really going on. [Read more…] about You bet, you lose, you pay