TW: Have never heard of any of the companies or people below, but I thought the quote from the media person to be priceless. Usually media managers are smarmy spinners, not so much in Ms. Laumaea's case.
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"On Monday, Barry Minkow put out a press release accusing a NYSE-listed company, InterOil, of being “nothing more than hype”. InterOil has had a large short interest for some time, and it seems that Minkow touched a nerve, because InterOil’s senior manager for media relations, Susuve Laumaea, went borderline insane via email in response:
'you are a gutless coward of the highest order, a jealous and envious SOB… You are a loser, a non-achiever and a sour-grape. Piss off you good for nothing… Do not be afraid on account of me being a descendant of cannibals … no, no, believe me, I will not cannibalise you or feed you to the swamp crocodiles…
you are known crook, conman, convicted felon, a psychopath and a pathological liar who is jealously envious… You have no sense of common decency. You are neither here nor there among the cream of decent God- fearing humanity. You are a scum of the earth, a creepy-crawlie who should have been locked away and the key thrown away too so that you rot away like the dung heap you are. You are a coward of the highest order… I can’t use you as crocodile feed because you are too poisonous … those alligators will die eating you, cooked or uncooked…
Who gave you the authority to investigate InterOil, you piece of shitty non-entity? You are nothing more than an internet pirate, a low-life manipulator who is out to profit by your dishonest, fraudulent, slanderous and cowardly methods. Up yours.'
Well, the “convicted felon” bit is actually true, but in many ways that just makes Minkow more believable as an uncoverer of fraud. But somehow it’s not easy to trust a company which accuses its critics of being a “dung heap”, and tells them they are too poisonous to feed to crocodiles."
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/17/media-relations-emails-of-the-day-interoil-edition/
Showing posts with label Felix Salmon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Felix Salmon. Show all posts
Friday, December 18, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Wine Snobbery
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"Mike Veseth reprints the most depressing list I’ve seen in a long time:
The top ten individual wines (by volume not value of sales) in 2008 were (drum roll) …
1)Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay
2)Cavit Pinot Grigio
3)Beringer White Zinfandel
4)Sutter Home White Zin
5)Inglenook Chablis
6)Ecco Domani Pinot Grigio
7)Mezzacorona Pinot Grigio
8)Copper Ridge Chardonnay
9)Yellow Tail Chardonnay
10)Franzia White Zin
The top-volume wines are always, by definition, going to be mass-produced wines. But that doesn’t mean that every single one has to be white (or the abomination known as “White Zinfandel”, which is basically wine for people who think that Yellow Tail Chardonnay is too dry).
Franzia White Zin retails for as little as $13.11 for a 5-liter box; if you assume the wholesale price is say $12, and assume 125ml glasses of wine, that puts the cost to the restaurant of a glass of wine at just 30 cents. You can see why restaurants would be keen to push this stuff. And you can also see why any self-respecting diner would rather stick to Budweiser."
"Mike Veseth reprints the most depressing list I’ve seen in a long time:
The top ten individual wines (by volume not value of sales) in 2008 were (drum roll) …
1)Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay
2)Cavit Pinot Grigio
3)Beringer White Zinfandel
4)Sutter Home White Zin
5)Inglenook Chablis
6)Ecco Domani Pinot Grigio
7)Mezzacorona Pinot Grigio
8)Copper Ridge Chardonnay
9)Yellow Tail Chardonnay
10)Franzia White Zin
The top-volume wines are always, by definition, going to be mass-produced wines. But that doesn’t mean that every single one has to be white (or the abomination known as “White Zinfandel”, which is basically wine for people who think that Yellow Tail Chardonnay is too dry).
Franzia White Zin retails for as little as $13.11 for a 5-liter box; if you assume the wholesale price is say $12, and assume 125ml glasses of wine, that puts the cost to the restaurant of a glass of wine at just 30 cents. You can see why restaurants would be keen to push this stuff. And you can also see why any self-respecting diner would rather stick to Budweiser."
TW: This is a post from Salmon is a nice metaphor for how urban elites can get all snobby. Americans drink a lot of wine, much of higher end but the big volumes are in less foo foo varietals and price points. This has always been so not only for wine but for most consumer products. The folks selling wine know this, of course. Sometimes they create slightly more sophisticated sounding brand names (i.e. Ecco Domani and Copper Ridge from Gallo) to advance their cause. But at the end of the day the mass market is far different than those in the big cities would think.
But then how is white zinfandel so different from French rose (without naming names but I know some serious yuppies who really like French rose) except for the provenance (and some technique)?
Friday, May 22, 2009
If You Cannot Measure It, You Cannot Manage It (cont.)
TW: Posted on this a couple of weeks ago. This is follow-up. As measurement technology improves and becomes more economical, energy usage can be managed and reduced without sacrificing quality of life, in other words productivity and efficiency improves.
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"Google PowerMeter announced its first partnerships today, with energy companies from Kentucky to Canada participating in the program. I spoke to Hal Snyder, who works for one of them, San Diego Gas & Electric, which has recently started installing what it calls “smart meters” in 1.4 million homes in southern California. It’s up to 10,000 now, hopes to get more than 200,000 by the end of the year, and have everybody installed by 2011.
Any of SDG&E’s customers can get their electricity-usage information from the utility’s own website, but now they’ll have the option of getting it straight from Google instead, embedding it on their iGoogle home page, that kind of thing. And the more they see how much energy they’re using, the less they’ll use — a 5%-10% reduction up-front, with more down the road when they start replacing appliances and light bulbs and the like.
None of this comes cheap: SDG&E is spending $500 million on this scheme, or about $350 per installed meter, but reckons it’s worth it in terms of hitting conservation goals, improving system reliability (they don’t need to wait for phone calls any more to know that power’s down in a certain area), and even obviating the need for new sources of power if and when variable pricing is introduced and moves consumption away from peak time and into the night time and evening.
The question is what happens for those of us who don’t have such an enlightened energy utility. Will we pay $350 to Google for a gizmo which does something similar? Since it’s Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company, will they subsidize it somehow? Or should we just start lobbying our legislators to make smart metering happen nationwide? (I’m unclear on the degree to which such things are part of the stimulus plan.) In any event, the quicker this happens, and the more people that get this information, the better off we’ll all be."
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"Google PowerMeter announced its first partnerships today, with energy companies from Kentucky to Canada participating in the program. I spoke to Hal Snyder, who works for one of them, San Diego Gas & Electric, which has recently started installing what it calls “smart meters” in 1.4 million homes in southern California. It’s up to 10,000 now, hopes to get more than 200,000 by the end of the year, and have everybody installed by 2011.
Any of SDG&E’s customers can get their electricity-usage information from the utility’s own website, but now they’ll have the option of getting it straight from Google instead, embedding it on their iGoogle home page, that kind of thing. And the more they see how much energy they’re using, the less they’ll use — a 5%-10% reduction up-front, with more down the road when they start replacing appliances and light bulbs and the like.
None of this comes cheap: SDG&E is spending $500 million on this scheme, or about $350 per installed meter, but reckons it’s worth it in terms of hitting conservation goals, improving system reliability (they don’t need to wait for phone calls any more to know that power’s down in a certain area), and even obviating the need for new sources of power if and when variable pricing is introduced and moves consumption away from peak time and into the night time and evening.
The question is what happens for those of us who don’t have such an enlightened energy utility. Will we pay $350 to Google for a gizmo which does something similar? Since it’s Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company, will they subsidize it somehow? Or should we just start lobbying our legislators to make smart metering happen nationwide? (I’m unclear on the degree to which such things are part of the stimulus plan.) In any event, the quicker this happens, and the more people that get this information, the better off we’ll all be."
Sunday, May 10, 2009
If You Cannot Measure It, You Cannot Manage It
TW: Following up on yesterday's post about improving society by filling in information gaps, here is news that Google is moving to expand its reach by creating a means by which to easily and cheaply track energy usage. Daily life is filled with inefficiencies simply because we cannot accurately and/or cost effectively track data. There is an old management axiom, "if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it". These type initiatives are the means by which societies grow their economies whilst working around resource constraints.
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"The behavioral sociology of measuring energy usage is simple: the more you know about how much energy you’re using, the less you use. Just getting the information cuts most people’s energy usage by somewhere between 5% and 15%, while people with high electricity bills (like me) find it much easier to isolate exactly what is causing those bills and can then work out how best to reduce them through upgrading appliances or replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or any number of other routes to energy efficiency.
The problem is in the measurement...Enter Google, which has now announced plans to release free PowerMeter software which will map any individual’s energy use on their phone, home computer, or iGoogle homepage. The little gizmo which plugs in to your fusebox is going to be very cheap, and with any luck will somehow be available for free to anybody who might have difficulty paying for it. (This is part of Google’s philanthropic google.org arm, after all.)
...I anticipate it’ll save me a few hundred dollars a year. His colleagues have already installed it — one of them discovered he was paying for all the washers and dryers in his building. When will I be able to get mine?"
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/05/05/awaiting-powermeter/
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"The behavioral sociology of measuring energy usage is simple: the more you know about how much energy you’re using, the less you use. Just getting the information cuts most people’s energy usage by somewhere between 5% and 15%, while people with high electricity bills (like me) find it much easier to isolate exactly what is causing those bills and can then work out how best to reduce them through upgrading appliances or replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or any number of other routes to energy efficiency.
The problem is in the measurement...Enter Google, which has now announced plans to release free PowerMeter software which will map any individual’s energy use on their phone, home computer, or iGoogle homepage. The little gizmo which plugs in to your fusebox is going to be very cheap, and with any luck will somehow be available for free to anybody who might have difficulty paying for it. (This is part of Google’s philanthropic google.org arm, after all.)
...I anticipate it’ll save me a few hundred dollars a year. His colleagues have already installed it — one of them discovered he was paying for all the washers and dryers in his building. When will I be able to get mine?"
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/05/05/awaiting-powermeter/
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Anatomy Of Flackery: The "Need" For Corporate Jets
TW: One of my favorite things is learning how media is manipulated by PR firms, corporations and most of all governments. Salmon provides a quick example relative to stories on the need for corporate jets suddenly appearing this week. Corporate jets are the ultimate perk and they are sweet (and if you have ever been on one you would start pondering how to get your own...). There are legit uses for them but probably only about 1 time out of 10 times they are used.
From Felix Salmon at Portfolio:
"Two high-profile financial columnists filed two strikingly similar opinions on corporate jets today:
#1
A private plane is really a flying office. It is a way for a busy executive to get from one place to another as efficiently as possible, to get as much work done as possible on the way, and to avoid down time.The executive of an important company has immense responsibilities. His or her time is precious. To waste that time in an airport security line or dealing with flight delays is, quite frankly, a sin against the stockholders. Flying on a private plane is not a decadent act -- it is just a way to move a very valuable asset around to maximize its productivity. To keep executives from using these planes is as foolish as not allowing them to use cell phones or computers.
#2
I have some sympathy for the industry. There is actually some point to executives of big companies with plants or facilities spread across the US, and indeed around the world, flying point-to-point by corporate jet to visit them.As a shareholder, I would prefer senior executives to save time in this way rather than having to queue at airports to get through security check points.
Is there some kind of PR push going on? As it happens, yes there is! And it was announced today! Well done, PR people!"
From Felix Salmon at Portfolio:
"Two high-profile financial columnists filed two strikingly similar opinions on corporate jets today:
#1
A private plane is really a flying office. It is a way for a busy executive to get from one place to another as efficiently as possible, to get as much work done as possible on the way, and to avoid down time.The executive of an important company has immense responsibilities. His or her time is precious. To waste that time in an airport security line or dealing with flight delays is, quite frankly, a sin against the stockholders. Flying on a private plane is not a decadent act -- it is just a way to move a very valuable asset around to maximize its productivity. To keep executives from using these planes is as foolish as not allowing them to use cell phones or computers.
#2
I have some sympathy for the industry. There is actually some point to executives of big companies with plants or facilities spread across the US, and indeed around the world, flying point-to-point by corporate jet to visit them.As a shareholder, I would prefer senior executives to save time in this way rather than having to queue at airports to get through security check points.
Is there some kind of PR push going on? As it happens, yes there is! And it was announced today! Well done, PR people!"
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