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EDAR (Everyone Deserves A Roof), an innovative shelter option for homeless in LA. More info here.
A Pretty Cool Little Red Riding Hood rendition
So, I don’t have any deep thoughts this morning as most of what I’ve been thinking about is an upcoming trip and how we are going to make it smooth and entertaining for two toddlers. Any advice? Mainly, these are the specific things I’ve been thinking about…
Just a Friday off-hand question: What do you think of the comment system on Trying To Follow?
I switched a month or so ago to this comment system called InstenseDebate, mainly because it allowed for commenting replies via email (an amazing feature). I had one or two glitches along the way, but I’ve been happy with it so far. Curious if any of you are using the reply by email feature when you receive replies to your comments. If so, what do you think? If not, would you consider trying it?
The other related question is that I was considering implementing the ability to comment through your facebook account. So many people are already on facebook, this switch would both make commenting easier for you and allow your comments to be posted in the Facebook news feed. Does that interest folks or not really?
Just checking in, thanks for humoring me by engaging in conversation
I’m going to make this appeal extremely short and straightforward: Please don’t by chocolate this Easter (unless it’s certified Fair Trade). Here is why:
This is different then the fair-trade vs. free-trade argument that comes up regarding coffee and some other commodities. This is a certified (meaning independent regulators, investigation etc) vs. unregulated (meaning enslaved children are likely harvesting the cocoa for your chocolate).
I’m very glad that legalized slavery was eliminated in this country many years ago, but our unconscious consumers is fueling slavery today. Buy jelly beans or something this Easter, but if your going to buy chocolate please make it fair trade.
Fair Trade chocolate options: Equal Exchange, Global Exchange, Cadbury (but not this year, they have http://www.stopthetraffik.org/news/press/cadbury.aspx that there Dairy Milk product will be Fairtrade certified by late 2009)
Will you avoid buying chocolate this Easter?
(this might be a little too geeky for some of you, sorry. It just seems like everyone and their mom is getting a twitter account, like it’s the next facebook or something, so I figured it was time for me to chime in with a little rant)
I am not impressed with Twitter. When I heard about the concept, it seemed interesting. This was my understanding. Basically it was a social network of individual mini-blogs. Everyone was limited to keeping their blog post to just 140 characters and the focus was to be on answering the question “What Are You Doing?” It wasn’t terribly unique or anything, but it’s been catching on. Why the 140 character limit? Well, that’s about the size limitation of a standard SMS Text message. This is unique. The goal, or so I thought, was to create a blogging platform and social network so that you could update your status from your mobile phone, wherever you are. In turn, you could also receive updates from your friends that you choose to follow on your phone as well. Neat. And when I got a phone with an unlimited text messaging plan I decided to give it a shot. But a few months in and I realize, twitter wasn’t for the simple Text messaging plan user like me. The actual platform and site itself isn’t geared toward or friendly toward simple SMS users and thus the community and users that make it up aren’t friendly toward typical SMSers either. No, this is an elite crowd of blackberry, iPhone and G1 users, the truly geeked out ones among us.
Here’s 4 reasons why Twitter isn’t for the SMS user:
And the non-text message friendly environment has created a non-text messaging friendly community:
Now that that’s out of the way…
The truth is I’ll probably still use twitter. There are enough hacks, tweaks and third party apps to make it semi-useful for me, but the bigger reason is because there is an actual niche community out there (and I need some adult connection during the day). I probably won’t be as interactive on it as most, but it will probably morph into my mini-blog of status updates running around chasing toddlers. And maybe twitter will get their act together and provide a quality service to the SMSers they seemed to originally be aiming for.
(If You are reading this post via email the videos will not show up. If any of the titles are interesting to you please visit the site and view them here, just click on the link above)
The Adventures of Johnny Northside Movie Trailer. This is a guy from my neighborhood who blogs a ton and someone made a documentary about him. The trailer actually looks really interesting.
Always informative GOOD on Clean Drinking Water (in honor of World Water Day)
Are You Straight? Great short piece (ht. Mak)
A guest post today by Steve Fine (my dad) on the insurance industry and Executive pay…
I was a part of the problem – well not a direct part, but in the industry. In the late 80’s, early 90’s, I found myself in the insurance industry. It was a time of innovation, probably still is and probably always will be. From my perspective it seemed like a game of cat and mouse. Laws were created by congress to create a sense of fairness and the brilliant minds of actuaries and lawyers would work to find loop holes.
A law or ruling that limited the amount of benefits, (i.e. deferred compensation, company paid health plans etc), that the top earners of a company could be given different than the benefits given to the rank and file would be passed. Before most people were aware of the law the insurance and financial services industry would create a plan or program that could bypass the new law using a loop hole the legal department discovered. Would it be wrong to assume the law was created with the loop hole in mind?
This game laid the foundation for the disparity between top executives and regular workers. The following is from the website of the House Committee on Financial Services:
Wages for Regular Workers are Stagnant-Earnings for Top Executives Increase
“CEOs have seen increases in their earnings at a rate far greater than that of the average worker. In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies made 24 times a worker’s pay-by 2004, CEOs earned 431 times the pay of an average worker.[1] From 1995 to 2005, average CEO pay increased five times faster than that of average workers.[2] While CEO pay continues to increase at rates far exceeding inflation, wages for the vast majority of American workers have failed to keep up with rising prices. In fact, real wages for the 90% of Americans who earn under $92,000 a year have actually fallen since 2001.[3]
When comparing CEOs to minimum-wage earners, the contrast is even starker. In 2005, median pay for CEOs of the 100 largest companies rose 25% from the previous year.[4] Minimum-wage earners this year, on the other hand, made the same amount as last year, and every year before that since the 1996-1997 increase-adjusting for inflation they actually made less than then (in inflation-adjusted dollars, $5.15 today is the equivalent of only $3.95 in 1995). [5] CEOs, on average, take home 821 times as much as a person working for minimum wage.[6] With this extraordinary ratio, an average CEO makes more before lunch on his first day of work than a minimum-wage earner will make all year.”
While the insurance and financial services industry created the instruments which allowed legal manipulation of the laws, it instilled a sense of greed and changed the focus of business owners. Where once was pride of ownership, pride of making a product or providing a service and creating employment opportunities, now there is only a sense of making money, the more the better and the rest be damned.
Stay educated on all the reasons that the foundation of our free market economy is crumbling. That way you will know where to throw stones and when to duck.
Here’s an open discussion thread for you…
The other day I saw this image and posted it on my Tumblelog, with the comment “Not sure how to take this”.
Anyways, it ended up being extremely popular amongst the tumblr crowd with a lot of people reposting it and linking to it and “liking” it (a tumblr thing).
My question is: Why?
Why do you think so many people found this image worth sharing?
Less then a week ago, I blogged about a family in South Africa that I knew personally who were raising support to bring an Autism Therapist to their hometown. I’m happy to report today that they’ve raised above and beyond what they needed! Thanks to everyone who donated and contributed to the efforts.
The success of that small effort got me thinking about the power we can have when we collectively rally around something. Reminded me of the famous Margaret Mead quote:
“Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has."
It does seem these days we are all inundated with email and online petitions to sign about every single cause under the sun. You could probably spend your whole day inside blogging about and signing petitions, and at the end of the day, I’m not sure what the result would be, or if you’d be happy with it. From the little I know about political engagement, a thousand signatures on an online petition doesn’t mean much, a few hundred basically form emails means a tiny bit more, but a small amount of personal hand-written and mailed letters, or intentional phone conversations can have a significant impact.
In the same way, a handful of committed folks taking specific actions could have an impact in many areas far beyond political.
I’d love to form a small group of bloggers and readers who committed to taking 5-10 minutes a week, or maybe a month to start, to take action on a specific action that we choose. The focus would be primarily on non-financial actions, ideally things that could be globally focused, but local specific actions as well.
I just think a committed group would have more motivation to take action on task then individually being inundated with facebook and email requests. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me.
This is just an idea and a brainstorm. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know if your interested and what you think this could look like, or if you’ve had similar success in other areas.
(I’ve decided to start a brief series on money saving ‘Thrift Tips’. It’s practical and I love learning these types of things from others so I figured I’d share mine too)
The last thrift tip was a general overview of how we do phones in our house, but I mentioned a great cell phone tip I wanted to share today. Unfortunately, this only applies to T-Mobile MyFaves, Verizon Friends & Family or Alltel’s My Circle, sorry everyone else.
So, here’s the trick.
I mentioned yesterday that we use Grandcentral Google Voice as the number I generally give out to others, and that Google Voice calls are forwarded to our cell phones. Well, this is how I’ve managed to make the incoming calls free using Google Voice and MyFaves.
Now, this might simply be a terrible teaser post, since it turns out Google Voice is not open to new sign-ups yet. They just switched from Grandcentral (bought by Google 2 years ago) to being branded as a Google product. So, my guess is I’ll be getting invites from Google to pass on soon. If you want to be on my list, leave a comment. There are some competitors out there, but I’m not sure that any of them do the same thing. That’s it for the phone related thrift tips. If you have tricks you’ve used let me know!