You can hear more about it at length in this video interview of Smari McCarthy by Vinay Gupta.

[via the Humanitarian Technology Network]

Maybe part of the problem is that monolithic US corporations choose to keep large amounts of profit for their executives and choose to pay monkey pay to their counter jockies rather than see those people as a major interface with the public and invest in them. Service jobs in the US are some of the only jobs that aren’t going to get outsourced and yet they’re the butt of the joke of entire movies. When was the last time you went to a fast food restaurant and thought, “What nice service.” And yet when all you sell is a pretty crappy pizza, maybe you should consider for a moment whether good service is an important element of your business model. You know when the last time was that I did think, “What nice service.” Apple. And nearly every time I’ve dealt with them. Not only do I think an Apple store employee (well-trained, carefully picked, paid decently with benefits) would know better than to pull a stunt like this, I don’t think they would want to. I know several people that work for Apple and they would never jeopardize jobs they genuinely like. Of course, Apple’s not a great example, since they’re doing so poorly of late. Even then, their success couldn’t have anything to do with their customer service.

I would put money on what Domino’s knee-jerk reaction to this event will be, asking “How do we use technology to become the big brother of our employees, whom we clearly cannot trust?” That’s great, pay them squat, and then oppress them so that they love you so much more. Consider how well that’s worked out for Wal-mart. How many resources will they now have to waste just trying to get their employees to like them again? Companies are going to have to become aware that their brands are increasingly vulnerable to brand sabotage by employee access to wildly loud new communication mediums, and that the best medicine will be to make employees happy. And in case these dolts in suits forgot their management 101 theory, happy employees will make a better product and/or service for you. If you don’t want idiots like the above working for you, pay decent wages and give good employees incentive to hang around.

Instead, suits like Sharon Allen, chairman of the board of Deloitte, says things like this: “While policies are important, you have to create a solid values-based culture… that encourages employees to make good decisions about how they act inside the company and externally.” I couldn’t synthesize my concurrence more! Ugh. I’m beginning to think that MBA stands for Masters in Bogus Antispeak. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. In plain English: treat your employees with dignity. This is basic, basic stuff that corporations have been able to neglect for a long time because without unions, service employees haven’t really had an opportunity to fight back. The playing field is leveling though and if Domino’s is afraid of what their employees do on accident, just wait and see what happens when their craptastic attitude toward employees actually ticks off a media savvy one.

“It’s too expensive.”

“But sir, did you know we will never charge you more than bla bla bla…”

I had some actuary tables from a project I worked on a while back and I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I figured that the probability of me losing my job or getting injured or the probability of my death is currently at about 3.645%¹ I called and I waited and the operator came on and after the initial exchange the inevitable question occurred “Would you like to tell us why you are canceling the service?”

Yeah, I’ll tell you why.

I responded, “You charge $1.35 / $100 in credit per month, correct?”

::Looks some stuff up:: “Yes that is correct, but only if you have a balance on your credit card.”

“Well, let’s say I often do. Let’s say it’s $100 a month in fact. That means you would charge me $16.00 annually. And if I, for some reason, ran my card up to the max and tried to pay it down, you might charge me $300 and up annually.”

::Long silence::

“The thing is, I’ve calculated the probability of my injury, loss of employment and death and that only comes out to be a 3.645% chance per year.”

“Did you really–is that–?”

“It can be done.”

“What we do is cover your payments and bill in case of–”

“Oh, I understand what you do; that’s why I calculated the probability. You see, you’re asking me to place a bet for a $1.35 per $100 per month per twelve months that I won’t die or get injured, etc. And the percentage of losing my money on this bet are roughly 96%. Does that sound like a good bet to you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s a little bit more tricky but essentially at your lowest rate, you would be charging me an additional 16% interest per year on my credit card.”

“So I will get your cancellation confirmation…”

I have to admit that doing this in the interest of saving time was obviously a red herring. I just relish the opportunity to harass corporations. However, I did figure out some interesting stuff about interest and credit protection and mortality statistics and corporations. And here’s the real value of working out the calculations: a credit card protection program like this is a scam, plain and simple. A credit protection program will only help you if you don’t pay off your balance every month, but then, if you pay off your balance every month, why would you need protection? It is better in the long run to put the money you would otherwise put toward protection, toward the bottom line of the credit card, especially because in the long run we are all dead.

The other thing that occurred to me was that this girl (fairly obviously a girl, fairly obviously Indian) that I was harassing had done nothing to deserve the harassment—I also wasn’t that harassing; technically I was just being factual. But even so, we have to stop thinking of corporations as monoliths and the “poor” people working for them as innocent drones. We all have a choice in this. Like so many things in post-postmodern life, it’s like the Matrix. Those who are in the system are part of the system and you can’t pretend that they are not the enemy.

But I don’t like saying things like that either—that she’s the enemy. It’s just that all the metaphors for economics and business that we use that stem from concepts of war aren’t appropriate anymore. They’re just the leftover detritus of the testosterone-filled suits of the 1980s who couldn’t stop reading “The Art of War.” You’re competitor shouldn’t be your enemy, you shouldn’t talk about your customers’ loyalty. People should give loyalty to hearth and home, not financial products and cars and soap. The customer support woman was not my enemy, but she was in my way. I wanted to cancel the account and move on with my day. They want to use the opportunity to up-sell me—at my inconvenience. Business shouldn’t be about war; it should be about quality of life. Corporations that deliberately take action to cut their bottom line while keeping you on hold or, even worse, to keep you on the phone so they can trick you out of your money are not the kinds of corporations that US consumers should be supporting. It’s our support of these corporations that is going make the phrase “Where’s my bailout?” the most popular phrase of 2009.

Some mortality statistics: * http://www99.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=car+accidents * http://www53.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=heart+disease+risk+33yo+male

You can see the virus spreading...

Unlike other memes, which seem to pop into your life or your inbox intermittenly, you can watch this meme spreading in real-time just by watching twitter feeds. I feel like I’m watching people get colds, though. Yuck.

1. Opera makes you use their domain name

2. Opera sets condition on what you can and can’t share; among those things:

   upload, transfer or otherwise make available files, images, code, materials, or other information or content that is obscene, vulgar, hateful, threatening, or that violates any laws or third-party rights, hereunder but not limited to third-party intellectual property rights.

   In other words: anything we don’t like.

3. You have to use their software and their software is closed source.

4. Also, Opera marketing makes claims to be peer-to-peer, that is, direct from your computer to your friend’s computer, but… you have to go through their proxy servers. Oh well.

If you care about this sort of thing, I strongly encourage you to read Messina’s full in-depth piece. It’s worth it. For me, this is just yet another example of marketing bullshit, and by bullshit, I mean the technical term. Marketing of this kind isn’t really lying inasmuch as it is bullshit. Lying would imply that the lie-teller was aware of the truth and is conniving to keep you from it. Bullshit is a total disregard for the truth or falsehood of any claim. Opera is “reinventing the web.” Bullshit. First of all, no one’s going to revolutionize the web until something comes along that is something other than the web. And second, why is reinventing something a claim worth making? We have an old expression: “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” The web is the wheel. Do something new. Stop reinventing what works perfectly well.

Frankly, even the author of the Techcrunch article made some questionable statements that sound like typical journalistic hyperbole: “The pursuit of ‘now’ is conditioning us to expect information as it happens, whether it’s accurate or developing.” In other words, you can have it now with a greater probability that it’s wrong, or you can wait and it will be more accurate. Since when are accuracy and immediacy mutually exclusive? I’m sorry, but I happen to think that being present at an event is kind of critical. But that sort of conundrum is just the sort of drivel that established mainstream media ventures want the public to believe—”Fair and balanced”—it is a perspective that distinctly benefits them. The author of the article goes on to point out that, “Fact checking is a vital part of the news business and is ultimately what separates amateurs from experts.” Right. Because the mainstream news always does it’s fact-checking. Yes sir, the pros are always on top of the story and they’re always near the story too! And when you consider their track record, it’s hard to argue with them, right? Right?

Ali G must be laughing in his fake grave to hear this rubbish. The news media have always been slanted and especially so when it is commercially driven. When the bottom line matters more than the facts do, the business turns to making a fuss, not reporting the news, because making a fuss gets ratings. Worse still, the making of a fuss is monolithic, given over only to those with the means (i.e. communications systems) to decide what the news is going to be. With twitter, at least you can gather the facts for yourself and make your own judgement rather than having someone make the judgement for you.

Don’t be fooled. News is a business and businesses have PR wings. The mainstream media would have you believe that they are the de facto organization they are because they are relevant and because they do the hard research. The truth is that they are sensationalist in order to get ratings, and research costs too much money to do well. That makes them irrelevant and inaccurate more times then they get caught. If the mainstream media ever did it’s job, why in the world would we need Factcheck.org or The Sunlight Foundation?

via Techcrunch

Update

Apparently, someone out there agrees with me (and he’s a LOT funnier about it):

1. Everyone that is allowed to follow the clubhouse can see its postings (including @ posts to the clubhouse).
2. Any member of the clubhouse can DM the clubhouse account privately and anyone in the clubhouse will see it.
3. Any member of the clubhouse can publicly @ the clubhouse

Obviously, this is not as fancy as a clubhouse could be. For instance, only one person would get the privilege of receiving DMs on a device. With most systems (like Tweetie for the iphone and ipod) that’s a fairly moot problem (since you can switch between accounts with relative ease and see DMs that way). But it would be a good way to create a somewhat cloistered area for casual semi-public messaging. I work on a collective novel over at Jelly Halo right now and despite the great things PBworks have set up, there isn’t a communication system that would be as “collected” in one place as this method would.

I wish I lived in the heyday of ham radio. Because I would call it Hamming. Everyone would be like, “Huh?” And I’d be like, “Just wait.”

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

The second thing that I learned from this experiment was that what I like to write on Twitter has nothing to do with what I like to write on Banapana. Admittedly, I’ve been loosening up on the syntax here on Banapana—makes it easier to write more—but I’m still writing about particular subject matters, not stuff like this:

The evidence is mounting, and scientists agree, global idiocy is an increasing concern–possibly doubling by the year 2010

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

That there’s a legitimate place to put a thought like that on the Internet?—now that’s just fun! So, it looks like Twitter is just entertainment! Who knew that enforcing a 140 character limit would make email fun? So, at any rate, I am for the moment considering posting a twitter digest of my best from the week here, but no more daily updates. It makes a mess.