They say reality is stranger than movies.
Globalization has gone wrong, very wrong if a Bangladeshi man has to travel 6000 miles to sells tacos on the streets of Mexico City.
Add to that the fact that this man is sure to be a Muslim-and therefore eats no pork. And he got swine flu?
Or perhaps it is Mexico’s work visa program that has gone wrong?
You are efilecabinet.com, one of many companies that are trying to get big and hit the big time so you can be bought out by Oracle or whichever sugar daddy happens to come along.
Now here you are, in a recession. Or a depression. Or a world-wide pandemic that will turn us all into zombies. Take your pick. You decide to increase sales by putting up an ad on Google.
Then when someone clicks through to your site…you might as well have thrown the money away
A fascinating look into the turd-world of “direct calling”.
I saw this ad on top of my gmail. For $3, these guys, Leads Direct Marketing will robo-call millions of people, and transfer the live lead to you. Having been robo-called a few times, I cannot emphasize how much I hate these people.
Check out this page where they list out all their ‘messages’.
In every ecosystem, there exists a class of animals whose job it is to traffick in filth. These guys, perform that job in our ecosystem.
The best way to beat these guys is to make sure you are on the Do-Not-Call Registry. Of course, the DNR has many many loopholes, but it is at least a start.
A few days ago the governor of Texas made some ham-headed statement about seceding from the USA. Most people asked him to not let the door hit him in the posterior on the way out. Most of the world wants to come to America, STILL, and he wants to leave. Who does he think will want to move to his little redneck rump state if it is not part of America?
Anyway, this blog is about business, not emotion, so here we go with the business angle.
I was racking my brain thinking of some innovations to come out of Texas, and I am sure there are some, but other than the Baylor University medical complex, and NASA in Houston, I find it hard to think of anything.
This does not include Texas’s famous steakhouses and their BBQ, both of which are excellent.
Dell is near Austin, but it has never really innovated anything, and is now slowly fading into irrelevance. All it did was ride the boom for about 15 years.
There’s the SXSW festival, but that isn’t innovation.
Southwest is in Texas, and they did innovate a new business model, but they did that back in the 70’s and haven’t changed their secret sauce since then. Jetblue and Virgin America and Spirit and others are making Southwest look more and more like a legacy airline.
The energy companies are concentrated in TX, but try getting them to get off their petroleum crack pipe…it just ain’t happening.
Possibly the only good things in Texas are the rent contol laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful cheap housing) and zoning laws (there are none, resulting in plentiful and cheap housing and industrial).
Mercifully, this state senator in Texas put me out of my misery by publishing this list of Texas ‘firsts’:
1) 49th in teacher pay
2) 1st in the percentage of people over 25 without a high school diploma
3) 41st in high school graduation rate
4) 46th in SAT scores
5) 1st in percentage of uninsured children
6) 1st in percentage of population uninsured
7) 1st in percentage of non-elderly uninsured
3rd in percentage of people living below the poverty level
9) 49th in average Women Infant and Children benefit payments
10) 1st in teenage birth rate
11) 50th in average credit scores for loan applicants
12) 1st in air pollution emissions
13) 1st in volume of volatile organic compounds released into the air
14) 1st in amount of toxic chemicals released into water
15) 1st in amount of recognized cancer-causing carcinogens released into air
16) 1st in amount of carbon dioxide emissions
17) 50th in homeowners’ insurance affordability
18) 50th in percentage of voting age population that votes
19) 1st in annual number of executions
http://shapleigh.org/system/news_article/document/882/Texas_on_the_Brink_2007_Final.pdf
Agriculture is definitely unsexy. You go to your local garden shop, and some wizened old guy tells you the best way to pot or mulch or whatever other verbs/adjectives are applicable to agriculture. But online, it’s a whole new game.
I was very surprised to see sex being used to sell fruit trees. Check this out:
You can see these types of examples all over TyTy Garden Nursey. http://www.tytyga.com/
What a great way to circumvent content filters!
I am on a redeye from LAX to NYC, desperate to score a window seat so I can try and get some sleep.
I go to the online app to see what seats are available. It’s nice that they have a seat map, and they helpfully mark out my seat for me.
And then I scroll down to the bottom of the page
And there are no seats.
There are NO seats available on the ENTIRE plane.
So why even show me a seatmap? Just tell me that there are no seats available to choose from.
Instead, you make me waste time, and waste your own server cycles.
I had a computer science teacher in high school who would have a field day with this example of bad design.
I am convinced that the government is incompetent. Yes, I know, some parts of the government work well, and the US is pretty well governed as a whole, when compared with the rest of the world (except for Switzerland and Singapore).
But it is little nitwit things like this that drive me up a wall.
Los Angeles is the country’s second largest city, and Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the entire USA, with a population that tops 10 million.
All property owners must pay tax twice a year, on Dec 10 and on Apr 10. So what do most taxpayers do on April 8 and April 9? They go to the website to figure out how much tax they have to pay.
And what happens to the website? That’s right, it goes down.
Stuff like this makes my usual bogeymen the FTC,the SEC and the FAA look competent.
I will not turn this note into a scathing attack on the NYTimes, but it sure has fallen from grace in my eyes. They hocked their HQ, and are trying to survive in these crazy times. Just recently their stock traded at less than the price of one copy of the Sunday times. I think I trust the writing from exiledonline.com more.
The only way the NYTimes will survive is if it publishes GOOD articles, not chaff like this.
Here are two reasons why:
Here is an article on the FAA (IMHO quite possibly the second most incompetent federal agency in the USA) “Scrambling to hire more Air Traffic Controllers“. The article reads like a 8th grade term paper, just one long narrative with a few quotes. Its singular and biggest fault is that the article refuses to go into the REASON why there is a ’scramble’ to hire ATC’s: it is the convoluted, dingbat method by which air traffic controllers are hired. Prospective ATC’s who do not come from the military have to first attend a special school where they obtain a degree in air traffic control or something, and they have to be hired by their early 30’s. So, for example, an engineer with a Ph.D. from MIT who is 35 would not be qualified to be an ATC. I don’t precisely know what ATC’s do, but it can’t be tougher than being a surgeon, and you can become that at age 40.
In this economy, where engineers are losing jobs by the tens of thousands, the FAA can hire ALL the ATC’s it needs if it institutes realistic requirements: have a technical degree, pass a security screen, and pass the FAA’s in-house training academy.
And here is another article by James Traub, on Pakistan, the world’s most mispronounced country. It says “Can Pakistan Be Governed?” Well duh. Of course it can be governed, it is the quality of that governance that matters. So we start out with a bad title. The article talks about how the President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardafi is faring in his early days in office. The article revolves around a misstep made by the President, in not reinstating a judge, Iftikhar Ali Chaudhry. The country apparently went bananas over having this judge reinstated. Zardari said no no no then he said yes. What Traub COMPLETELY missed was the real reason why people in Pakistan cared about this judge. The regular folk of Pakistan (anyone without access to a Western escape hatch) are literally dying for a decent, working justice system. Now, this judge, whom everyone wanted reinstated, was the chief justice for three years. What did he do in the three years to gain so much faith and love from the people? Did he improve the justice system? Did he write an opinion that changed Pakistani society? From my cursory scan of Wikipedia(you can google it yourself), it seems he did nothing that would affect the lives of the regular folk. Isn’t the chief justice supposed to manage the country’s justice system? So is this article just useful for its shock value, telling us how our latest puppet in Pakistan is going to blow it?
