A Series of Tubes

New news on the yelp front.  As background: A while back, yelp originally got in the news due to an east bay express article regarding extortion practices that their sales department would engage in.  Essentially east bay express claimed that yelp would call up a businesses and say “hey that’s a nice rating you’ve got on yelp.  It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.  Those reviews can remain untouched.  On a unrelated note, we have an advertising program that you can become a member of on yelp.  Just remember that your enrollment in this advertising program will be you giving money to the people in control of your stores rating on the internet. I hope you make the right decision.”

I had emailed the CEO of the company regarding the east bay express claim and got responses from him denying the claim but using quite possibly the worst logic imaginable and making me more suspicious of yelp after talking to him.  It turns out that yelp is getting sued over their extortion racket.  They deny the charge and say that they will fight it in court.  I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

With California in financial ruin, and the health care reform bill slowly transforming into the health care status quo bill, it’s hard to not become a pessimist.  Matt Taibibi is not helping.  The link below a video because it apparently auto plays and I didn’t want that when people loaded the main page: Read more

Every year the Nobel prizes get awarded and every year I cringe whenever I hear someone say “Nobel Prize in Economics”.  The reason I cringe is because there is no Nobel Prize in Economics.  Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite, made a ton of money, and dedicated his money to be used handing out prizes for Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Literature, and Peace.  The first prizes in these categories were given out in 1901.  Nobel didn’t give a rats ass about economics.

There are people that give a rats ass about economics though: Bankers.  The Swedish National Bank is called “Sveriges Riksbank“.  In 1969 they decided to start giving out prizes to economists.  The name of their prize is “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences”.  Of course nobody cares about a prize given out by the Bank of Sweden, so they dedicated their prize to Alfred Nobel, making the full title of the award “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel“.  In order to help people make the common mistake of labeling it the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Prize is awarded in the same manner and with similar ceremonies.  The winner also gets to stand with the actual Nobel Prize winners in a ceremony on Dec. 10th.  instant prestige with only a minimum amount of gerrymandering.

In the New York Times article about the recent winner of the fake Nobel prize, the author states that the prize was started by the bank and that the prize is in memory of Alfred Nobel.  The full title of the prize is never given in the article, however Nobel’s name is used in the title, the first sentence, and throughout the article.  There is one mention of the Swedish Central Bank, but only in passing, and also right before giving some bio information about Alfred Nobel to make the reader forget that Swedish Bank stuff.

Of course the fact that the New York Times even made a token mention of the Swedish Bank is impressive.  Most people just call it the Nobel Prize in Economics (especially business writers).

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I’ve recently found out that Bodum, the makers of press pots, is running a razor/razorblades business model.  Admittedly the razor isn’t cheap for Bodum, so my analogy isn’t exact.  I’m currently on my 3rd glass container for their press pot and this morning it inexplicably broke.  I’m assuming it has to do with glass expanding and contracting due to a sudden change in temperature.  Regardless of the physics of how it happened, the economics of the situation is that I should have bought a more expensive stainless steel press pot for a larger initial cost because constantly buying glass carafes is expensive. The psychology of the situation is that I’m an unhappy customer.  See my broken pot below:

If I had done more searching I would have know this was a problem, see the review here.  I’m not going to be suckered into buying another glass carafe.  Of course Bodum knows that you will eventually get fed up with buying the glass carafe and makes an insulated stainless steel one as well.  Sneaky sneaky.  I will not be lured into your money trap Bodum (and apparently your steel one doesn’t hold heat in very well).  I’ll have to see if Frieling pots are any better (the bar has been set pretty low).

I’m sure there are smart CEOs out there.  When CEOs make bad decisions, and the decision recently made by the CEO of whole foods was a colossally bad decision, you remember it more than when a CEO makes a good one.  Whole foods is often referred to people as whole paycheck because their prices are higher for various processed foods and also because the people saying it think that they are being funny.  When I hear that phrase I glare with my whole soul at their failed attempt at humor.  Puns should be funny or make you groan.  It fails both those tests so…you get the glare.  Enough with the glare…on to the real story.

So the CEO of Whole foods wrote an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal.  In it he starts off with a quote from Margaret Thatcher about socialism.  I’m going to stop right there for a second.  If John Mackey, CEO of Whole foods, wanted me in a bad mood, the quickest way to do so would be to start his ideological screed on health care with a quote from Margaret Frign Thatcher.  Has John Mackey never been in a single Whole Foods store?  Whole Foods customers are not the type to start up Margret Thatcher fan clubs.  John Mackey launches into his hatred for a single payer health care system apparently unaware that his own customers most likely favor a single payer system with greater percentages than those any other major corporation’s customer base.  I cannot back that up with an actual poll, since I don’t think one has been done, but I would be shocked to find out if it were untrue.  So now the stockholders and the board of directors of whole foods can feast on the images such as the one above made by former customers who now feel the burning desire to take their dollars somewhere else.  Either A) John Mackey has found a way to make more money by getting his customers pissed off at him or B) he is a colossal idiot.

The major point of the article that he makes is that there is that the government shouldn’t be paying for people’s bad eating habits and if people would just shop at his stores, the private health insurance would be just fine.  His article badmouths government plans in Britain and Canada which are wildly popular in those countries (UK conservatives were out defending the NHS from US criticism).  Whole foods has stores in the US the UK and Canada.  Trash talking popular government programs in two out of your three of your company’s current markets is…(I’m having a hard time coming up with more synonyms for dumb or working in the name Captain dumbass).  One has to wonder how Whole Foods got as big as it did with a CEO that has the same wisdom and tact as a man yelling your momma jokes into a megaphone to Godzilla while simultaneously throwing things at it’s crotch(Godzilla is notorious for his sensitivity regarding the reputation of his mother).

The worst part about the whole thing is that this is not John Mackey’s first mistake.  He’s been caught trying to inflate the price of his company’s stock on yahoo.  Being an idiot once is one thing, but twice it starts reflecting bad on the board of directors and the stockholders if no action is taken against him.  The guy is drunk with wealth and doesn’t have a proper outlet for his stupid.

People make their way to my blog in a variety of ways.  One of those ways is a google search.  I can view the top searches that land visitors on my site.  Below is a list of a recent top 5:

Top Searches

1. roomba troubleshooting
2. aca 24
3. troubleshooting roomba
4. uc regents salary
5. farting tubes

From this list I know that I provide internet users help with their roomba, inform them about California legislation, help them even more with their roomba, and let them know about the UC regents salary.  I am however leaving a very important group of google users unserved by my blog.  That group of users are those with a burning desire to know more about farting tubes.  I will not allow those with a burning desire to become knowledgeable in the area of farting tubes look at my blog, and leave unsatisfied.  This very important demographic will finally find their home in this post.

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I do not have direct proof of the copied idea but I will just point the following out:

1) I have a blog

2) said blog is awesome

3) anyone can read my blog, including people at the University of California

4) The UC started its own blog.

The fairly obvious step at about 3.5 is that the University of California decided to copy my genius idea of starting a blog after seeing how awesome mine was.  Of course the UC has a lot to learn about writing a blog.  First, they need to open up their blog to comments.  Second, they need to post more pictures and videos (the whole blog looks repetitive and boring).  Lastly, they need to post that they are going to cut UC salaries fairly and proportional to the total compensation package they receive (including the cost of any car allowance and or houses) and not just salaries.  As a side note I find it slightly hilarious that UC president Mark Yudoff’s car money is called an allowance, the same thing little kids get each week to learn about money… “Now be a good boy UC president and enjoy your car allowance.  Play nice with the other kids and don’t mess up California’s higher education system”.

I’m going on a slight diversion about the UC budget before I get back to talking about the UC blog.  The proposed salary reductions for staff at the UC following the California budget crisis are as follows:

Looks like a fair deal right?  The people making the most money take the biggest hit.  I’m surprised the higher ups at the UC would approve something that would hit them the hardest, since they are most likely to land in that 7th salary band.  What is that asterisk doing up there at the top of the table?  It sort of hovers like the home run record of a steroid injected baseball player.  Let’s read what that refers to:

The UC system carved out the lowest cuts for senior managers, less of a cut than the lowest paid employees at the UC.  All of the sudden this very fair system is a big middle finder to everyone that is not a senior manager.  I became a fountain of 4 letter words when I found that little nugget of information.  Anyhow, end of diversion and now back to the new UC blog.

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It is hard for me to put into words how horrible Transformers 2 is, but I will try. It is as if director Michael Bay found some way to take a dump on my brain and bludgeon it with a rusty object at the same time.Actually that is probably being too kind. Perhaps your reaction would be to illegally download this movie and watch it for free instead. Don’t. It’s not that I lost 3 hours of my life. That would be as if I did nothing for 3 hours. Instead I was made a worse person for seeing this movie. The only people that will enjoy this movie will be the sado masochist, the brainless, and Michael Bay.

Transformers 2 finds ways to make robots racist, put testicles on a robot, have inane and unrealistic dialog and characters, and horrible plot devices that don’t make sense. Oh no, the thingey we need turned into shards, now we can’t use it….oh wait….after carrying it around for 15 minutes, as dust, it is now put back together conveniently right when we need it with little/no explanation of how. Almost every character in the movie doesn’t appear to have a point. By the end I was really hoping that about 90% of the characters would die because I didn’t want to listen to them any more. I wonder if George Lucas had a hand in the character design because most of the characters have the same feel as JarJar.

The screen cap in the picture is of Megan Fox, the girlfriend, being scared of the robots outside. I was making similar faces, but more because I was vomiting slightly in my mouth. Please do not see this movie, even if you are curious what an on screen suck fest looks like.

Well I had a previous post with the back and forth with Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of yelp.  It was incredibly frustrating to have to ask him the same questions over and over since he kept answering the questions he wished I had asked instead of the questions I did ask.  His final response to me is as follows:

We have many thousands of advertisers on Yelp these days, I suggest a much simpler and faster solution… pick up the phone and call a handful of advertisers (they are easy to find on our site) and ask about their experiences with Yelp.

The East Bay Express did that and buried their findings at the end of their 4k word piece…

Interviews with more than a dozen local business owners suggest that Yelp sales reps may be wording their sales pitches more carefully these days. Owners who were approached by Yelp in recent months said they were told they could choose one positive review that would appear at the top of their page, which would clearly be denoted as a “sponsored review.”

And plenty of Yelp advertisers still have negative reviews on their pages. “You pretty much have to fight tooth or nail to get a bad review moved or removed,” said one East Bay restaurant advertiser, who wished to remain anonymous. Peter Snyderman, the owner of Elite Cafe, said his sales rep never mentioned moving negative reviews.

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