Dude! Take your hands off my hookah!

I wrote earlier about the smoking ban in Virginia and mentioned bootleggers and baptists. It appears that the law doesn't make an exception for hookah bars. In discussions about this, two claims have been made to me about why the ban is a good idea. One is that people are "forced" to go to bars that have smoking and it poses a health risk to them (iffy logic in my mind). The second is that people who work at these places are the real concern. They are "required" to be there and apparently have no other options for employment (does that sound preposterous to anyone else?). Well, here we seem to have a problem with both premises. What about places where the idea of smoking is embedded directly into the reason for the place existing? It seems like it violates both of the afforementioned rules. My personal favorite part of this is that private smoking clubs, which are almost exclusively patronized by upper class white males are exempted from this ban, yet hookah bars, which are essentially the same thing only for the rest of us are banned.

Kaine's Chief of Staff's response to this is priceless. He says, "This is a bill that is intended to protect the health of the workers, and you have to be consistent" in applying the law."

Several things that are angering me about this that I'm not going to discuss in depth:
Killing jobs while in a rescession
Why no one is mentioning that this could easily be seen as racist/classist given the populations most directly affected
How this fits perfectly into the slippery slope argument on the nanny state
I don't mean to harp on this. I really thought I was over this. But the guy is going after HOOKAH's! Every college kid in the state should be up in arms!

on second thought...

after talking over my last post with a friend, I realized I wasn't careful enough with my word choice on my last post. I've decided to delete the last post and rethink the points I wanted to make. I regret any offense I may have caused and will be more careful in the future. The last thing I want this blog to be is a place of name calling. That would be, as the phrase goes...not very platinum behavior on my part.

Kennedy Center chiseled from the breath of god herself!

multi demential platinumdom... 

I recommend watching Christon "Christylez" Bacon.  He's flipping amazing.  The group is top most platinum in my book. 

Honorable mentions... everything else. 

http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/

Proof that unintended consequences can be funny

I am literally crying as I watch this.

Where will we get our news in 20 years?

I'm not a writer for a newspaper (though I occasionally write an op-ed). That being said, I am constantly amazed at how slow many industries have been to adapt their businesses to the internet. I recently saw this collective expert blog post on the NYTimes about the future of newspapers. What was truly astonishing was that some really smart people could have such obviously bad ideas. There were also some great ideas, but it's amazing to see how hard it is for us to change the way we think about things...

Joel Kramer - chief executive and editor of MinnPost.com
I do think there is a strategy that might keep a high-quality regional newspaper modestly profitable in the future: Rely much more on revenue from readers. Publish a newspaper worth $2 a day, the price of a cup of coffee, and $5 on Sunday. Raise the quality. Make it more in-depth, more analytical, to complement the immediacy of your free Web site, and do not make that deeper, more insightful coverage available for free on the web. Perhaps make the printed product a tailored mix of sections that appeal to different readers: For $2, you get to pick, say, four sections out of six.

Seriously? Here's another one...

Steven Brill - founder, The American Lawyer magazine, Court TV and Brill’s Content. Chief executive of Clear-Verified Identity Pass, the fast pass for airport security, and teaches journalism seminars at Yale College and Yale Law School.
So papers have to find a way back to being paid. I think in many ways the prospects may be brighter for papers like the Seattle P.I. or the Star Tribune to charge online, because they don’t have as many content competitors for the good local reporting they do. Local newspapers are the best brands, and people will pay a small amount online to get information — whether it be a zoning board meeting or a Little League game — that they can’t get anywhere else.

Truthfully, there were some really smart comments that reflect some pretty innovative ideas about what news will actually become, so don't disregard the post after reading this. I was just blown away by these two individuals lack of understanding of the internet.

Then I saw this blog post about how some reporters now operate in the internet age. It's really interesting and I strongly recommend it as a read. Notice how the reporter mentioned looks at the diverse spaces that people on the internet congregate as an opportunity to grow his audience, not a liability.

I guess what this all means to me is that it very much reflects the way entrepreneurs see the world in general. Entrepreneurs look around and see opportunities: opportunities to innovate and create something new. They are not afraid of risk (that's where I jump ship) and they have an intuitive sense for what people want. If you look at the different articles and perspectives, it becomes clear who are the entrepreneurs and who are the people about to get creatively destroyed by the evolution of the newspaper industry.

Things I think about when it's 20 degrees outside

In high school, I remember being told to cough on my cuff and sneeze on my sleeve. I guess now we need to come up with a new phrase for blowing our noses.

Trust Fall

Simply platinum:

Keeping the Stimulus a platinum as it can be

I'd like to draw your attention to StimulusWatch.org, the brainchild of some of my coworkers down the hall.  The site covers all the potential projects that may receive federal funding as a result of the passage of the stimulus bill.  The purpose is to get citizens involved in rating the quality of the potential projects that may receive funding once the stimulus bill is passed:

It is expected that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be signed by the President on February 16. That legislation won't list the projects to be funded. Instead, it will appropriate money for federal grant programs, such as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) or Surface Transportation Program, which will then use the appropriated stimulus money to make grants to cities. In the case of CDBG, for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will be the agency that will decide (using a formula) which of the projects requested by the mayors will be funded.

Be sure to check out the "Least Critical" tab.  Don't hestitate to vote either--it helps with feedback about the projects.  I find $500,000 for a dog park and $99,600 for the installment of doorbells to be a little outrageous myself.

GPM instead of MPG is platinum thinking

A big part of the training I have gone through in my current job is understanding how important mental models are, both in our daily lives and in the big picture questions that occupy the politicians. The way we understand the world, unsurprisingly, has a big impact on the way we approach decision making. One of the really important ones is called marginal analysis, which describes the way most decisions we make in life aren't all or nothing, they are questions of whether or not we want a little more or less of one particular thing. Most of the time, people use marginal analysis without even knowing it. Here's a video I found on the web done by some high schoolers. It captures the idea in a general sense and I like that they were able to find a way to incorporate marginal analysis into the hell that is dating.



Anyway, now that you've lost that six minutes of your life, here's the beef (HT: Tyler Cowen). The article is interesting because it says a couple of things to me. One: it's really easy to mess up marginal analysis if you don't have a strong understand of what margin you are working from. Two: Damn you, Escalades!