Art Thiel has a great article lambasting Frank Chopp and other arguably ineffective Washington State Legislators.
There are definite arguments against funding the ridiculous arena package the new Sonics owners proposed. But then it’s equally insane when the same people ignore their previous arguments to support the same package, but with the Huskies as benefactor.
Anyway, intresting read.
I’ll be on the road for a few days and likely offline, but I want to leave you with a web site that you could easily spend a few hours on over the next few days.
With all the talk about Social Media, YouTube, Facebook, etc… we sometimes forget about the really cool Guerilla Marketing efforts that were (and still are) so important. The kind of things that deliver shock and awe to a mass of potential consumers not expecting to be marketed to.
It makes me think about the stupid restauarnt in my neighborhood that lost my business forever yesterday by putting a paper flyer on my windshield on a rainy night, so that when I got up in the morning, I had to stand in the rain and peel soggy, nasty paper off my car before driving to work. And then I see these campaigns from Blog.GuerillaComm.com.
And then for fun later, also check out WebUrbanist.com. Another neat place for finding unique products.
I’m playing with some stuff from Voki.com this week. Check out how to build your own Avatars as well, and I’ll be figuring out how to make them do cool stuff here.
The PR team for Roger Clemens is certainly on the ball. In response to allegations of steroid use, they have launched a PR attack back that encompasses the Grandfather of Mainstream media, 60 Minutes, and dives all the way down into the Social Media space with a 1:30 video on YouTube.
Obviously most of us are not Roger Clemens, so we cannot call Mike Wallace and get a sit down interview whenever we want one. But even in Seattle or at any local level, we all can effectively use Social Media avenues like YouTube, by simply engaging a Social Media Agency, having a high quality video professionally shot and edited, and then leaking it into the blogosphere through respected bloggers. This is the new way to manage PR, and Roger’s team has done it very well.
Hope you got everything you wanted this holiday season. And if you didn’t, hope you got enough cash (or at least gift receipts) to fill out your list. Happy Holidays.
So I haven’t ever written or researched anything about healthcare, so this little rant/question is really from a sample set of one experience relayed to me by someone. But I ask you to read along, and as you hear the story, think about your own threshhold of pain. At what point, honestly, would you have given in?
I was at a nursing home and met a nice guy named Will. Will was in his late 50’s, there visiting his mom, who is a patient/resident. He shared his experience with me.
Years ago, Will had worked as an internal affairs officer for a branch of the U.S. governement. His mother developed a degenerative back issue that placed her in a wheel chair and made her unable to walk. Will’s mother was a U.S. Navy vet herself and a widow, so she had some pension, medical benefits and inheritance to help defray the costs of medical care, and he placed her in a nice nursing home.
The home was great, but she slowly became more and more agitated. She was beginning to lose her sight in one eye, and her hearing. So after a year or so, they decided to bring her to Will’s home, where he lived with his daughter and wife.
Will’s mother’s eyesight and hearing continued to diminish, and in turn she became more agitated and cranky at his wife and daughter. Whenever they left her alone, she would end up in some predicament in the house. It got to the point that they simply couldn’t leave her alone. This of course caused considerable strain on the whole family, and Will developed his own illness. Plus, she started needing round the clock care.
So, they eventually placed her back in the nursing home so she could get round the clock care. Will had saved up more than half a million dollars from working for 30+ years for the government and retired with his pension so he could battle his own illness.
Now, 5+ years after moving her back in the nursing home, and more than 8 years since Day One, Will is just about flat broke. Supplementing the rest of his mom’s care from his own pocketbook has dwindled his family’s entire life’s saving. He has gone back to work, training to be a personal tax accountant for friends and family. His mom continues to be happy and boisterous, with nary a medical ailment other than her inability to walk, or see or hear well. Internally, she’s fine.
According to what our Privatized health care system asks for, Will and his mom have done everything right. She was in the armed forces for 8 years and receives some government sponsored pension. She used her husband’s life insurance and assets for her own care.Will worked until being offered retirement. He raised his kids and shipped them off to college. They both had health care. They utilized Medicare. They both saved for their own retirement.
And yet Will’s mom is outliving his money. His next step is to sell his house and move into an apartment to pay a couple of more years of her care. But then what?
I don’t have any answers when it comes to health care. And it’s easy to say, "Well people should just plan accordingly." But this is a tale of planning accordingly and still being failed by the system they planned within. If this situation can happen to a family of patriotic, college educated government employees, how does someone else deal with it?
++ Some of my own notes:
* This makes me very scared about people who want to throw high tax rates on a "death tax." If another spouse is surviving, why do we need to take away the money that family has saved, instead of letting the spouse use it for his/her own care?
* Should the hippocratic oath start taking quality of life into consideration? Imagine you were 80, wheelchair bound, unable to see or hear, and spent all day simply sitting in a chair looking in the hallway, waiting for your 2:30 bingo game. And by doing that, your grandaughter doesn’t get to go to college, or your son has to sell his house. How is your outlook on life?
* Why can’t we raise the retirement age? If we’re living longer, don’t we need to be working longer? If we’re living until 80, and don’t work until 21, we need more than 44 out of 80 people to be in the job force in order to sustain a standard of living. Can we really afford for every working person to be supporting them plus another non-worker?
Looking forward to your thoughts on this.
No, we haven’t joined the writers strike. But the entire staff of AndyBoyer.com headed east to Virginia last week to work on some non-technology issues. With spotty internet access, posting will be light. And really, you should be Christmas shopping, reading a book or playing Xbox anyway – not reading blogs. It’s the holidays, relax….
After the temporary enjoyment provided by Dropkick Monkey (story below), the real world came rushing back with a vengeance in the form of this story about the dumbest people who serve in a position of influence.
Short version of the story. 10 year old kid brings her lunch to school – in this case a steak. Since most well mannered youth are taught not to grab a steak bone by their hands and gnaw on it like a hyena, she also brings a knife in which to cut the steak.
Now, a reasonable but anal teacher may see a 10 year old with a knife and help her cut the steak so she doesn’t get hurt. A somewhat unreasonable and grudge-laden teacher may take the knife away and get her a plastic one. An extreme nutcase *may* give her detention. But you have to be psychotic to do what these teachers and sheriffs did.
Not only did they take the steak knife, they:
The Spokesman for the school is named Kevin Christian. He had this to say, "Anytime there’s a weapon on campus, yes, we have to report it and we aggressively report it because we don’t want to take any chances, regardless." Let me repeat – the girl is 10 years old. Kevin – I’m sorry, but you’re stupid.
Now, lest you think everyone in Ocala is this insane, I bring you good news. In a poll on the WFTV’s web site, the vote (at the time of this writing) was about 2850 to 150 that the school district’s punishment was too severe. (No word yet whether the 150 people who voted "No" are being supervised for dementia.)
One can only hope that the people in charge of the school board and sheriff’s office down there are voted out of office in the next election by a similar margin.
Ok, this post has been percolating in my head for weeks, and I’m finally getting it posted. But when the announcement was made about the MLS coming to Seattle, my first reaction was, "What a perfect city for pro soccer." Apparently, they already have 9,000 deposits for season tickets, so that instinct was right. Here is why I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
1) The Superstar Factor – I’ll bet you the stack of yellow cards I’ve collected in the last 12 months that the next huge European Footballer to cross the pond will end up here in the Emerald City. The reason – Paul Allen. A man who loves to surround himself with mega celebrities will not miss the opportunity to bring one of them to his own private playground, Qwest Field. Add to this the fact that co-owner Adrian Hanauer really knows soccer and has been able to draw some pretty major European teams over here in the last 5 years. (Don’t quote me, but I believe he was responsible for the Man United v Celtic, Chelsea v Celtic and RealMadrid v DC United games.) Plus, you have a celebrity co-owner in Drew Carry who has a few connections himself. I don’t know who it will be, but the next version of David Beckham moves to Seattle.
2) Seattle Summer Nights – 15 years ago, no one went to Mariner games, even with Griffey. But now everyone goes to Safeco Field to sit in a beautiful stadium on a 65 degree evening and watch a sport they barely understand or care about. And soccer is even better for this than baseball, a sport in which most of the time is spent either waiting for an inning to start or hoping something will happen. People will at least try one soccer game, if for no other reason, that it’s a nice way to spend a Tuesday night in July.
3) Soccer Has a Clock – A soccer game is over in 90 minutes plus halftime. Say the game starts at 7:00. You can absolutely bank on the fact that you can leave the house at 6:00, spend 30 minutes watching pre-game, 105 minutes in the stadium, and have Junior home and in bed by 9:30. How many people do you see leaving the Mariners game in the 7th inning? That is sub-optimal for everyone, especially a kid (who learns that you don’t have to complete things.)
4) Seattle Supports Winners – Seattle is fascinating. There is so much to do, we won’t deal with losers. But we have so much civic pride (or is it an inferiority complex) that we care about ANYTHING that wins. Mariners – sold out during the golden years. Seahawks – Adored statewide. Even the Storm were selling out during their championship run. Now remember that we have Paul Allen. This team will win. The MLS is not a hard league to build a competitor in. This isn’t like an expansion team in baseball where you have the Yankees and Red Sox to deal with. It’s a poor league that’s getting better, and even though there is a salary cap, I suspect Allen and his fellow owners will pour some money into top scouts, coaches and facilities to make this a place that good players want to come.
Now with all this being said, here’s how the owners or MLS could screw it up – which I don’t think they’ll do. But, if they make some of these easy mistakes, it will hurt their momentum.
Danger 1: Qwest concessions /Overall Costs – Football fans put up with the lousy and expensive Qwest concessions because a) it’s the Seahawks, b) They’ve already spent 3 or 4 hours getting lubed up in the parking lot or FX Mc Crory’s, and c) Tickets are already so expensive that getting jobbed for an extra couple of bucks on your beer is made relative. So that works for a sport in which a billion people watch the Super Bowl. And you could probably get away with that and more at a World Cup game here. But to anyone who knows enough about soccer to buy a ticket, the MLS is a minor league, and not a high minor league at that. Sure it’s called "Major League Soccer" but if the T-Birds change the name of their league to Major League Hockey, they’re still 16 year old kids. You can’t ding 23,000 people. You can price aggressively to 5,000 Sounder die-hards who love soccer so much that they skip work to go to the George and Dragon for a Champions League game. Premium pricing is a great tactic when servicing a niche. But if you want to fill 23,000 seats a game, make sure Dad can take his kids and some friends without feeling like he’s getting the shaft.
Danger 2: Acting like Soccer people – I have this debate with a friend of mine all the time. People who don’t know soccer, end up hating soccer when they hang out with soccer mega-enthusiasts. For example, when you are in Old Trafford and 65,000 Manchester United fans are all singing in unison – that’s cool. Better than cool – awe inspiring. When you are at a US vs Cuba friendly, and of the 20,000 people there, 25 guys from Sam’s Army are hammered and singing for 90 minutes straight, that’s annoying. We get it – we’re SUPPOSED to like soccer because the whole world does. We’re SUPPOSED to sing. We’re SUPPOSED to enjoy that the game will be 1-0 or 1-1. But we don’t, necessarily. It doesn’t make us bad people. It just means we need to learn and evaluate. And if I bring 3 friends to their first soccer game and have to explain why the fat guy with the drum is on his 42nd verse of "The Ref is a Wanker," while the guy next to him is on the 82nd consecutive minute of blowing his stupid horn, then I probably won’t get them back to another game. Do all that stuff, but in small doses. Save your uber-soccerness for US National games.
Danger 3: Too much Americanization – I think one of the coolest things in International soccer is when the two teams march out side by side before a game. The music, the drama , the tension. Imagine Seahawks vs Patriots and 90 guys came walking out in 2 lines of 45, with Hasselbeck and Brady walking lockstep trying not to look at each other. It would be fantastic. But at a Sounders game, some poor unknown soccer guy has to run about 90 yards by himself (except he’s usually trailed by 3 munchkins) through a little smoke to the pleasant applause of 5000 people. The American created "Tunnel run" is way cooler when there are 70,000 people and 100 cheerleaders. Americans want to see first class stuff. Don’t give us Domino’s Pizza and call it Italian food.
Ok, my longest post ever. Let me know if you disagree.
Thursday’s scheduled interview on the Jon Elliott show has been moved to Tuesday, Dec 4 at 8:30pm Pacific / 11:30pm Eastern. I am still unsure whether Seattle 1090 carries this hour of the show on a delayed basis, but you can listen to the audio stream live at Air America.com.