(Source: cartoonpolitics)
Reblogged from reagan-was-a-horrible-president with 230 notes / Business Amusing Comics Corporations USA Politics Obama
![theatlantic:
Both the NBA and the NCAA Want to Keep Athletes in College for Too Long
I hate to take a cynical note on this, but I don’t think Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA, or anyone else in the NCAA really cares about young men going to college—or at least attending college classes. I think what they care about is whether or not these young men play college basketball, and I think what they would like is to have the NBA’s cooperation in doing anything they can to keep boys playing college basketball for as long as they can.
The simple reality is that most basketball and football players who wind up in the pros had little or no interest in going to college in the first place. They want to be first in line for the professional drafts that will take them away from the world of amateur sham, very reasonably wanting their talents to produce revenue for themselves and their families instead of university athletic departments. Now, when the boys are in the best position to make that pay for them, colleges pretending to show some concern.
“It makes a travesty,” said Emmert, “of the whole notion of student as an athlete.” One might call that poetic justice since for nearly a century colleges have been making a travesty of the notion of athlete as student.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m22p833WHY1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Both the NBA and the NCAA Want to Keep Athletes in College for Too Long
I hate to take a cynical note on this, but I don’t think Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA, or anyone else in the NCAA really cares about young men going to college—or at least attending college classes. I think what they care about is whether or not these young men play college basketball, and I think what they would like is to have the NBA’s cooperation in doing anything they can to keep boys playing college basketball for as long as they can.
The simple reality is that most basketball and football players who wind up in the pros had little or no interest in going to college in the first place. They want to be first in line for the professional drafts that will take them away from the world of amateur sham, very reasonably wanting their talents to produce revenue for themselves and their families instead of university athletic departments. Now, when the boys are in the best position to make that pay for them, colleges pretending to show some concern.
“It makes a travesty,” said Emmert, “of the whole notion of student as an athlete.” One might call that poetic justice since for nearly a century colleges have been making a travesty of the notion of athlete as student.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
Reblogged from theatlantic with 59 notes / NBA NCAA Basketball Business Opinion
People are often confused about the overall extent of U.S. oil reserves. Some claim that the U.S. has hundreds of billions or even trillions of barrels of oil waiting to be produced if bureaucrats will simply stop blocking development. In fact, in a recent debate between Republican candidates contending for Gabrielle Giffords’ recently vacated House seat, one candidate declared “We have more oil in this country than in Saudi Arabia.
These Are The Prices AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Charge For Cellphone WiretapsHoly fucking shit. They have made a business out of wiretapping cellphones. This reads like an a la carte menu.
- Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target.
- Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra.AT&T demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages.
And then they try and pass that off as COGS recovery?
“Fees are charged to law enforcement in other circumstances such as court ordered requests and it’s important to note that any fee charged is for recovery of cost required to support these law enforcement requests 24/7,” she writes.
I’m not buying that. That’s way too low of a price, and way too cleanly packaged. If these companies cared about their customer and their privacy, they would be making it painful and confusing to get access. They wouldn’t have a clean price structure. These companies want the government business.
Reblogged from fourstorylimit with 160 notes / Cell Phones News Politics Privacy USA Wire Taps Big Brother Sprint Verizon Business
How Newspapers are Faring Trying to Build Digital Revenue
A new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that overall, media companies are struggling to build digital revenue, though some individual newspapers are faring better than others.
The report cites “cultural inertia” as a major factor, noting, “Most papers are not putting significant effort into the new digital revenue categories that, while small now, are expected to provide most the growth in the future.”
The report was conducted over 16 months, and analyzed 38 newspapers at 6 different media companies.
Read more: The Search for a New Business Model | Project for Excellence in Journalism
Reblogged from onaissues with 21 notes / Newspapers Journalism Business
It turns out that the light fixtures a builder used in my kitchen a few years ago have all begun to fail. One by one, each one stops working.
My guess is that he has no idea, and continues to confidently install these fixtures, his go-to choice for kitchen lighting. And why not? He doesn’t know that they only have a relatively short life. He doesn’t know because he didn’t ask.
Doctors and consultants and builders are often hesitant to ask about how something worked long after the work is done. It feels like nothing but a chance to hear a complaint.
It’s not. It’s a chance to show that you care. And a chance to learn how to get even better at what you do.
Clean Coal: Not a Thing
The coal companies are lying to you. Coal energy is not clean energy. It is the dirtiest form of energy generation we have. The coal companies are spending millions of dollars hoping you’ll forget this. A slick ad campaign doesn’t change the truth.
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
A look at targeted marketing. From the article:
One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way.
(via longformorg)
Reblogged from longform with 3 notes / Marketing Business Long Reads
The Role of Brands in Human Culture
In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Professor Philip Kotler (S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management and described as ‘the most influential marketer of all time’) and Martin Lindstrom (Chairman and founder of Buyology Inc, who was voted one of the World’s 100 Most Influential people by Time magazine). We discuss the nature of ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ together with the role branding plays in our economic and social world.
Eastman Kodak Co, the bankrupt inventor of the hand-held camera, plans to stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames in the first half of 2012 in a bid to cut costs.
The move marks the end of an era for Kodak, which is seen as one of the biggest corporate casualties of the digital age, after it failed to quickly embrace modern technologies such as digital photography, a product that it also invented.
The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month, said on Thursday that it will take a charge of about $30 million for the business exit, which it expects to generate annual operating savings of more than $100 million.
Read more: Kodak to stop making cameras to cut costs
Tumbling on success: How Tumblr’s David Karp built a £500 million empire
But Tumblr is growing up, fast: the site expanded its user base by 900 per cent in the year to June 2011. In 2010, it served under two billion monthly page views; now, it generates about 14 billion, more than Wikipedia or Twitter. Its 36 million users so far have created 42 million posts each day — 13.5 billion in total. According to Nielsen, it was the UK’s second most popular social network or blog in the third quarter of 2011, with 229.6 million page views, trailing only Facebook. In September 2011, the company raised $85 million (£55m) from investors — a round that valued Tumblr at $800 million (£500m).
Reblogged from bradlunam with 5 notes / Business David Karp Long Reads News Tech Tumblr Blogging
Your phone might know you better than your own mother. If Facebook doesn’t figure out how to make money on mobile advertising someone else will.
Advertisers are salivating. But, she says, “If you think about all the things Facebook knows about us, I think it can begin to seem a bit creepy.” Especially if you consider what else Facebook could learn using our phones.
And that brings us to another big risk facing Facebook’s business: privacy.
“Privacy is Facebook’s Achilles’ heel,” says Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate at the Center for Digital Democracy. “Its entire business model is based on selling of user data to advertisers large and small.”
