Boys, Girls and Perverts

While reading my friend Maggie's Blog I came across this video on a new channel of social media I hadn't heard of called chat roulette. The general idea is that you are randomly connected to a stranger with a web cam who you can talk with. If one of you doesn't want to talk to the other you can click next and are then immediately connected to a new stranger. The video does a great (and funny) job of explaining this additional reason for parents to be neurotic about their children's internet access.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Here is yet another gem from Maggie's blog that I love. Sure she's just a pretty 19 year old girl blogging about nothing specific, but according to chat roulette that mean's she is 90% more interesting than I am.

Ugh

Get Verizon wireless so you can become ignorant of art, nature and loved ones.

Go On, Be a Man

I love these Old Spice commercials because they mock the traditional male stereotypes portrayed by most companies.

Let's Rock

The Long Tail, Making Your Life Awesome Since 2004

Pretty Lights: Finally Moving  by  md9

Actually the long tail has been progressively making all our lives a little more awesome each year in varying degrees for the past ten or so years, but that wouldn't have made for nearly as bitchin' a title. (alright, maybe not bitchin' but at least moderately more catchy) I went with the year 2004 because that's when it was first defined by editor and chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson in his appropriately titled book "The Long Tail". The long tail lets businesses please more people and make more money while allowing us, the consumers, to celebrate our individuality at little to no additional cost. It accounts for innumerable positive aspects of our day to day lives and yet we seldom even stop to thank it. At this point I know what you are thinking "Mark, enough with the foreplay, just tell us what it is already!" Fine, but there is no need to hypothetically yell at me on my own blog.

The long tail refers to the theory that our culture and economy is shifting away from a system of high sales of a few items to low sales of LOTS of items. High sales of a few items means customers have a limited amount of choices. Low sales of lots of items means companies can target/satisfy a plethora of niche (small, specific) markets. Serving a specific market is traditionally very expensive. It requires storing and distributing its own set of goods. Over the past few years the internet has made distributing products exponentially cheaper, therefore allowing companies to reach more niche markets.




A classic example of the long tail model is Netflix. Netflix, simply known to Blockbuster as "the grim reaper", has taken the movie rental market by storm. Because Netflix doesn't have to fill thousands of storefronts with every title it carries it can offer a much wider range of titles at no cost to them from one place. Now instead of running the risk that nobody will want to rent "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2", and buying a couple thousand copies of it, Netflix can purchase one copy and make it available to every customer via the internet. Since the marginal cost of renting another movie is practically nothing, Netflix can allow its users to watch as many movies as they want and only have to charge a small monthly fee to pay the nerds who run the website. In 2007 Netflix announced that it has 85,000 available titles. I don't know how many you can find at your local Blockbuster (if you can still find a local Blockbuster) but I'm sure its a very small fraction of that.

The internet has been continuously making distribution so cheap that anyone can get their product out there if there is a corresponding niche market that might like it. My two favorite examples of this are the artist Pretty Lights and comedian Bo Burnham. Both produce excellent products that lack mass appeal but have found their niche markets by using the internet's cheap distribution. Pretty Lights has achieved fame by charging everyone's favorite price for his music, free. At PrettyLightsMusic.com you can download the entire Pretty Lights discography for absolutely nothing. Since his product only appeals to a small niche market he is making sure he reaches as many people within that market as possible. Even though he might make a few bucks of some people willing pay for his music, he makes more money through all the additional live shows his increased market presence demands. Enough said? Fine, here's more Pretty Lights

Pretty Lights: Let Em Know It's Time To Go  by  md9

Comedian Bo Burnham has also benefited from the cheap (aka free) distribution of the internet. He started out posting YouTube videos of his songs in high school that went viral and got him tons of exposure. Unlike most YouTube stars, Bo has actually made a career of it, staring in his own Comedy Central Presents special and having an album in stores. Here's him singing about the site that made him who he is.




One of those Youtube songs that created the buzz.

Game Theory With Balls

The prisoner's dilemma is a classic game theory conundrum. The best net benefit for both players is to cooperate with one another. However, if one player cooperates and the other betrays them, the one doing the betraying receives a higher payout while the one being betrayed is worse off. If both players betray each other the end result is dismal for both.




Here's a great example of the prisoner's dilemma on the hit British game show Golden Balls

Normal Food

After three years of continuously consuming highly processed campus dinning hall meals I have found myself thinking more and more "I wish I could just have some normal food". Upon further thinking the matter through however, I've discovered I have no idea what "normal food" is. It certainly isn't the dinning hall chicken breast that looks like it was squeezed out of a tube labeled "Chicken". Does that mean normal food is the food the majority of Americans eat on a daily basis? Chickens that can't even walk because hormones and genetics make them grow too fast for their bones to support? Factory raised beef so rampant with e-coli that it's washed in ammonia before it's shipped to you to eat? That doesn't sound "normal" to me. I'm starting to think organic is the answer. I've always felt it got a bad rap as being some type of delusional hipster diet. Cows raised on farms that eat grass? What a bunch of nut jobs.


With this on my mind I decided to watch the 2008 documentary "Food Inc." and have to say I was pretty surprised by it. I wasn't shocked by how mistreated the animals were, or by all the unnatural stuff that gets pumped into them. Those are all things I, like most Americans, was already aware of but tried not to think about. The thing that really shook me was how such a hideous industry is so seamlessly veiled from the public. When you walk through the grocery store most of the packages and names imply that the products came from a small farm. Lets be honest, nobody would buy kielbasa from Hillshire Mass Production Slaughter Factory.



Over the past thirty years a select few companies have grown and put he rest out of business. In the 1970's the top 5 meat packing companies accounted for about 20% of the market share. Today the top 4 make up over 80%. These massive companies furiously work to find ways to lower their prices because thats what we, the consumers demand. Each step these companies take to increase their efficiency results in making the food they produce less safe. For instance, feeding cows corn instead of grass is cheaper and makes them grow much faster in addition to causing their e-coli to skyrocket. If they were to feed them grass for even five days before they were slaughtered it would get rid of almost all the e-coli but still they don't. Why is it that we as consumers don't demand safer, more expensive food? I believe it's because of this small farm veil companies create through marketing. Nobody would walk into a car dealership and say "An extra $20 for airbags? No thanks". This is because safety is at the forefront of your mind when you buy a new car, but why not your food?

Another reason people don't stop to think about the safety or quality of their food is the false sense of security the FDA gives them. After Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and the creation of the FDA "dangerous" food feels like a thing of the past. Everyone thinks its just big oil companies pulling strings within the government but large food production companies are just as involved. Just as Condoleezza Rice served on the Chevron's board of directors and Dick Chenney was CEO of Halliburton, there are similar love stories to be told within the FDA and food industries. Here's a few:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas--> Former Attorney of Montesano
This is especially significant because he was the Judge who decided that a company can "own" the genetic code of a seed which essentially allowed Montesano to own the entire soy bean industry and exploit any farmer who wants to grow them.

Donald Rumsfeld--> CEO of SEARLE Pharmaceuticals (owned by Montesano)

John Ashcroft--> Recieved record donations from Montesano

North Carolina State Senator Wendell Murphy--> CEO of Smithfield (one of those 4 largest meat packing corporations)

FDA Branch Chief Margaret Miller--> Former Montesano Chemical Lab Supervisor

FDA Deputy Commissioner on Policy Michael Taylor--> Represented Montesano in lawsuit about whether they should have to label genetically modified food (they won)



My favorite part of the documentary was how they essentially summed up my previous post "Get Out and Vote (with your money)" For those of who you might be interested in watching "Food Inc." Here it is below.
I realize the videos I post on here usually get cutoff (if anyone knows how to fix this please tell me) so here's where you can watch it in full... Food Inc.

Canadian Pride (I know right?)

This commercial fills me with Canadian pride...and I'm from Long Island

I Love Subtle Product Placement

I don't know why the person who edited this wrote ads. These clips are taken right out of the show.

Hi, I'm G00475836, pleasure to meet you.

A huge selling point in education these days is class size. You've all heard the rhetoric. Smaller classes let students build relationships with their professors. Everyone gets more individual attention and stimulation. How can we ever expect our kids to learn biology if their professor doesn't know their middle name and favorite Brittney song?(like anyone could chose just one) Truth be told, I love stepping into a big lecture hall and melting into a sea of nameless faces. It's not that I don't want someone hand sowing seeds of inspiration and wonder in my intellectual garden so much as I enjoy the one way discrimination barrier lecture halls put between me and my professors. A close relationship with a professor can be great thing, but depending on the nature of the relationship it can also be equally destructive. As a student with ADHD I have experienced first hand the negative effects it can have on the relationship between student and professor. In the educational community there are certain standards for how "good" students behave. "Good" students sit up straight, look nice, pay attention, and ask lots of questions. Anyone who fails to follow this protocol couldn't possibly have a genuine interest in learning, right? From years of teaching sailing I know how personally insulting it can feel to be teaching an important lesson only to look up to see a kid not paying attention in class. "Doesn't he or she know I'm trying to help them?" "Do they not care how much work I put into this lesson?"

When I talk about discrimination I am not only referring to students with ADHD and other disabilities but any well intentioned student who doesn't look like the kid in a cereal commercial who just ate full and balanced breakfast. Lecture halls allow the incurable late comer to just grab a seat in the back, the hopelessly unorganized to fumble through backpacks un-frowned upon, and the perpetually unprepared to borrow a pen without the assumption that what they write with it will be of lesser quality.I have developed good relationships with professors in both large and small class sizes. Nobody stops you from sitting in the front of a lecture hall and asking lots of questions. It's not hard to stand out and foster a beneficial relationship with a professor if you are in the ten out of two hundred with a genuine interest in the subject matter. Lecture halls still allow for the sowing of those inspiration seeds college pamphlets try to portray, but more importantly they create a safe haven from the discriminating gardener.

Game Theory For Your Lame Ass Friends

Game theory can be a fun and interesting topic. Here's a game you can play with a group of friends to see how well you can predict them, they can predict you, you can predict them predicting you, they can predict you predicting them predicting you...and so on. It's called half the average.

Each player takes a slip of paper and writes down a number between one and one hundred. All the numbers then get totaled up and averaged. The objective of the game is to guess the number closest to half the average of the group. At first this may seem simple but the more you and your friends try to predict and understand each other, the more complex the game becomes. As each player tries to undercut the other the average continuously shrinks. The key is to predict how many steps each player has thought through and be sure to remain one step ahead of the group.

My favorite memory of this game is playing back on Trinity campus at UVM (T-town represent!). We had played a few rounds and the competition was heating up as everyone began to anticipate each other more accurately. A mutual friend from down the hall came into my room who I believe was somewhat "impaired". I explained the rules, he watched one game, smiled and said "I know I'm guna win". I didn't think anything of it, we all entered our numbers and I started adding them up. The guesses were pretty typical. I was feeling confident since I'd won the last two or three rounds. As I added them up I exclaimed "Who the hell wrote 70?". 70 is obviously a ridiculous guess because the highest possible half average is 50 and that could only happen if everyone wrote 100. My friend simply explained "I figured if I guessed high it would pull the half average up and I would win". This completely illogical guess caused me to lose the game but I had to laugh considering it was my inability to predict his lack of reasoning that caused me to lose.

At this point I know what you are thinking "Did Mark just tell a whole story about math games?"...Big Time

Or as Anna Speidel put it "Math games...ew"

Joose, The Rise Of A Not So Discrete Marketing Campaign

I know not everyone is a marketing expert like myself (one introductory class) but see if you can guess the target market of the new drink sensation known as Joose. The website is essentially a party and features SIX original rap songs ABOUT JOOSE that sound like they could easily be produced by Lil Jon, my favorite one being "Joose in My System". Some lines...

"9.9%, so magnificent...",

"yes I'm braggin, off that purple dragon (a flavor), drink that Joose got you rollin off your wagon"

"drink Joose, no need to drive, drink Joose, makes your party come alive"

"I'm like the black Bilbo Baggins, twisted off that purple dragon"
^(I have absolutely no idea what it means to be a black Bilbo Baggins)

Over the last few years alcoholic energy drinks have become a huge hit amongst younger crowds, mainly college students. They have also been attracting the attention of the FDA and other similar parties. There have been a lot of rumors going around that Joose has recently been banned by the FDA. After some research I found it is actually Sparks, Joose's smaller, less alcoholic cousin that has come across some hard times.
As of January 10, 2010 the promotion and production of Sparks officially ceased as a result of a lawsuit between MillerCoors and the Attorneys General of Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, and Oklahoma and the City Attorney of San Francisco. The reason the lawsuit was brought against Sparks instead of the more alcoholic Tilt or Joose is because Sparks holds 90% of the market share for said product, although this isn't a good omen for either of them.

Fans of Joose, get it while you can before you have to go back to good old fashioned Redbull and Vodka's, because thats obviously the healthy alternative these Attorney Generals are pushing you towards.

My heart is racing
My vision is blurry
No clue where I'm going but I'm in a damn hurry
If the bitches be droll and your bros be saggin
Electrify your party with that sticky purple dragon.

Joose, call me about a song deal.

Stand Up Economedy

"You might be an economist if the only reason you won't sell your children is because you think they might be worth more in the future."

Getting It In The Can

I've never gotten it in the can before but since I'm 21 now I might as well try it at least once...right?

Need I Say More?

Notice how Africa isn't even on the map, and yes, all it says for Australia is kangaroos.

Bribery Breakdown

While on the topic of political corruption, here's an article I just came across in The Economist about corruption in Afghanistan. If you plan on heading there for spring break plan your bribery budget accordingly...



The article said at least 60% of Afghans have recently resorted to bribery. I expected to see judges and police officers up there but cannot help but be somewhat disturbed by the fact that doctors and nurses are more frequently bribed than customs officers, members of parliament and the army.