“Think of how handily Detroit’s auto workers were distracted from GM’s greed when they were given Mexican free-trade-zone labor to treat as a scapegoat; the American worker’s enemy isn’t the Mexican worker, it’s the auto manufacture who screws them both.” from Overclocked, Cory Doctorow
Category: business
business
May 25 2025
Does advertising really work? Prove it.
So this obsession on the internet with clickbait. I get that the more clicks on an ad, the more money the company will pay a website to have their ad on the site. And I get that more clicks mean the ad is being seen by more people. And I get that the more people …
Jul 09 2024
advertising spending
“All 50,000 workers at the Yue Yen Nike Factory in China would have to work for 19 years to earn what Nike spends on advertising in one year.” No Logo, Naomi Klein (p352) “According to the 1998 United Nations Human Development Report, the growth in global ad spending ‘now outpaces the growth of the world …
Jun 08 2023
from Tim Dorsey’s Shark Skin Suite
on the demise of journalism, news reporting… “Newspapers, TV, radio, and websites everywhere were furiously consolidating into mega-media conglomerates. News was heading in a fresh direction … The owners and top execs saw their compensation rocket, and top television anchors in each market signed guaranteed contracts in the upper six figures. Everyone else was told …
Dec 30 2022
On getting paid. Or not.
So I was reading James Morrow’s The Wine of Violence and when I got to “Will the Journal of Evolution publish it? Publish, it, hell, they’ll make me an editor” (p25), I stopped, puzzled for a moment. Then it hit me. To Francis, the character whose thoughts those are, becoming an editor means status and …
Nov 19 2022
from Joel Bakan’s The New Corporation
“There are no limits in the [Paris] accord on continued exploration and drilling or on tar sands exploration (which experts say could alone defeat Paris targets), pipeline construction, or hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). The accord contains no legally binding emission targets, no timeline for emission reductions, no enforcement mechanisms, no concrete regulatory proposals, and no plans …
Nov 10 2022
re outdoor advertising – EXCELLENT POINT
“But there are other loopholes on French pavements. In Lille, as in Paris, shops are considered private spaces, and not subject to local advertising rules. So all kinds of shopfronts – from chemists to hairdressers and tech shops to trainer emporiums – can put up screens just behind their windows, beaming digital video into the …
Aug 05 2022
Smartphones and Pictograms: A Regression to the Primitive
Given the size of smartphones, one is reduced to using one or two digits to create a message (compared to the ability to use all ten digits when using a laptop/keyboard). That probably explains the increase in the use of pictograms: touching a happy face from a menu of emoticons is easier than inputting the …
Jul 15 2022
The Evil of Touchpads: Menus
I recently rented a cottage on the Bruce Peninsula and found myself infuriated by the tiny device to control the smart tv: to search for a specific movie in Netflix, you had to swipe across and across and across, back and forth, to move the cursor along the alphabet arranged in a long 26-characterer single …
fiction
