Archive for the 'Waste' Category
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Still Smelling the Sulphur
I’m just emerging from a Christmas Eve flu arrival, but wanted to post this story, sent on by my friend Doug Pressman.
Seems that it takes only 16 cargo ships to emit as much sulphur pollution as the entirety of the world’s billion-plus automotive fleet.
This speaks to the uncounted costs of our overclass’s continuing reliance on low-wage globalization, and also to the inadequacy of regulating isolated segments of the immensely destructive and wasteful corporate capitalist transportation regime.
It is also an important reminder of how comprehensive our problems are in this make-it-or-break-it century.
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Peckerware
peckerware (n): a useless product designed by one or more cynical peckers for sale to hapless, brainless peckers, with an eye to gathering marketing data on behalf of our pecker-filled overclass
Today’s peckerware news, as reported by The New York Times:
Philip Kaplan earned notoriety and profit a decade ago with a site that chronicled the implosion of the Internet bubble. Now he is back with a project that seems sure to get attention again: Blippy, a soon-to-start online social network that lets you share details of your credit card purchases with friends or strangers.
Mr. Kaplan’s earlier venture, an obscenely named Web site that parodied FastCompany magazine, chronicled the dot-com carnage in 2000 and 2001. Though that site trashed failing start-ups, Mr. Kaplan was an entrepreneur himself: he made money by devising a self-service tool that allowed advertisers to place ads on the site. The tool worked so well that in 2002, he spun it off to create AdBrite, which places ads on more than 100,000 affiliated sites and had 2008 revenue of $31.6 million.
And Kaplan has peckerwoodishness to (sort of) deny that the idea is to collect corporate marketing data:
Q. So you can aggregate spending data?
A. Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting data we’re hoping to provide to users. For instance, you can see people paying different amounts for the same thing: phone bills, cable bills, haircuts, gym memberships.
Q. Won’t marketers be able to see what people are buying and aim ads at your users?
A. Not any differently than they can see what you’re Tweeting or what you’re blogging about. It’s probably more interesting to marketers, but that’s not our focus. Our focus is just in making it a really fun and interesting place for our users.
Yes. Sure. Right.
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Dex Blows (as do all telephone capitalists)
...how to waste resources
In the western United States, one of the pieces of the old AT&T corporation is called Qwest. Qwest is about to do something it knows is unconscionable — throw yet another paper telephone book onto everybody’s doorstep.
If ever anything was outdated, it is the unrequested provision of paper telephone books for every household. But Qwest cares not. Phone book advertising remains a source of revenue and profit, so onward it steams, the planet and people’s time and space be damned.
Meanwhile, to alter the mental agendas of those who will soon be burning or recycling its unconscionable droppings, Qwest is running a multi-million-dollar TV ad campaign saying this:
Join Dex® in our commitment to being environmentally responsible by recycling your outdated directories. You’ll help save valuable natural resources and reduce energy consumption.
This kind of pre-emptive interpretive suggestion is, of course, a common corporate marketing tactic. By shifting the issue from “Why another pile of useless paper?” to “What do I do with my old phone book?,” Dex spends some of its customers’ money (and its workforce’s foregone wages) engineering the mental climate its shareholders need.
Qwest an eco-criminal? No, not us! “Join us in our commitment to being environmentally responsible!”
What commitment would that be, one might wonder as one trips over 5 pounds of pointless tree pulp? None, of course. Qwest is pulling a Big Brother, pure and simple. Up is down. War is peace. Another immense waste of paper is a commitment to the Earth’s ecology.
If we ever manage to create a movement for social change we could really believe in, one of its most obvious tasks would be to nationalize all telecommunications infrastructure and provide all such services publicly, without any marketing costs or profit margins or unconscionable ecological and existential waste.
Until then, all the mental and physical garbage being foisted on us by outfits like Qwest and the cell phone corporations remains a “business” only on the basis of our failure to recognize how outdated such capitalist practices are.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Cars in China
Having long since reached saturation in their main citadel of car-pushing, what do the corporate capitalists have in store for transportation arrangements in China?
According to Yang Jian, Managing Editor of Automotive News China, present trends suggest that China will have somewhere between 200 and 300 million cars in operation by 2030.
If electric cars become cheap enough, it could be far worse:
Their influence could be profound.
Electric cars, for example, are prohibitively expensive today. Yet given advances, they could become affordable to the mass of consumers tomorrow.
If that were to happen, the many millions of people riding electric bicycles could switch to electric cars. That would boost vehicle ownership to a level that is now unimaginable.
Something to think about the next time you’re tempted to swallow the notion that inexpensive electric cars are a good thing for anybody but corporate investors.
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
Annals of Commodification: Lotion for Men
As the world careens toward ecocide and social collapse, the corporate capitalists are hard at work thinking of (wait for it…) ways to sell lotion to men:
http://www.strongerskin.com/strongerskin/
It’s all there — all the standard marketing tactics — in this one. Lies, flattery, “aspirational” promises, and, of course, a bedrock of carefully-researched intentional fraud.
“Weak skin” is not a real medical problem. To the extent skin health is a real issue, it is 99 percent determined by diet, water-intake, and lifestyle habits. Rubbing on lotion does little or nothing to make human skin “strong.” At most, it makes skin temporarily smooth and greasy feeling.
Of course, you can’t sell lotion to men based on a desire to have soft-feeling skin for a few hours. Hence, this stunning piece of tendentious diarrhea.
Brought to you by Unilever, the same assholes who also peddle perfume (Axe Body Spray) to teenage boys…
Monday, November 9th, 2009
What the Automotive Bailout Bought
Remember that Obama-designed bailout of the automotive capitalists, the one that will direct at least 130 billion no-ownership-exercised public dollars to what remains of the real-economy vanguard of our mortally decrepit overclass?
What changes has the bailout cash facilitated, you might wonder. New, cutting edge cars that out-perform Japanese makes? Radical MPG improvements? Exploration of the idea of using existing production equipment to rebuild the nation’s rail stock and infrastructure?
Not so much.
Turns out, the money is retooling marketing strategies, not transportation arrangements.
If by now you’ve finished rolling on the floor laughing your ass off over GM’s new “May the Best Car Win” campaign and perhaps vomiting as you realize that pickup trucks and SUVs remain a central part of the Not-So-Big Three’s plans, consider the latest news out of Chrysler.
According to Automotive News, here is what that pool of investors is planning to do with their free handout:
Chrysler hikes spending to rebuild brands
After five months of near silence on the marketing front, Chrysler Group is roaring back with a new attitude. The automaker is ratcheting up advertising this quarter and plans to do so in each of the next two years, CFO Richard Palmer said last week. He spoke at the unveiling of Chrysler’s five-year plan under Fiat S.p.A., which took control of Chrysler as it emerged from bankruptcy in June.
Chrysler Group vehicle sales fell 30 percent last month from a year earlier and are down 39 percent this year through October. CEO Sergio Marchionne said, “I can give you one reason: The fact that we’ve been incredibly quiet for the last five months, so the marketing positions of all our brands have been incredibly weak.”
Chrysler’s plan is big — literally. Three experts who attended the meeting were given a loose-leaf binder 2 inches thick outlining it.
Continue to See Chrysler’s “New” Marketing Ideas…
