SLAMBOARD

Oil is the number one commodity in terms of value. People make the argument that a war is being fought largely over the control of this indispensable stuff.

The number two commodity is coffee. Why aren’t wars fought over coffee? I guess it is because possession and control of the land that grows coffee does not provide wealth. In fact, coffee growing regions include some of the poorest places on the planet. In many cases, there may be a small battle of wills when the coffee is taken from the farmers by unscrupulous middlemen. The middlemen are armed with guns, and a little bit of money. The coffee farmer has some beans.

Maybe the economics and the politics of oil would be more like those of coffee if impoverished men, women and children could pick barrels of it out of the jungles and the mountains and carry it out on their backs.

This disturbing bit of ‘information’ was left in a comment today. The link was to what appeared from the title to be a Malaysian blogspot splog.

I have managed to increase the traffic on this blog by a factor of ten over the past few months, thanks largely to one very big story. The amount of spam comments that I look at has increased infinitely. Now that the discussion of that particular story has, for the most part, left this particular arena I think I will install Akismet so I don’t have look through all the spam. This very effective spam filter rarely catches real people and I won’t be double checking.

I got sidetracked yet again while researching an unrelated topic and I was struck by how defensive and political the language is on WhiteHouse.gov. I have been there before and I seem to remember is being more statesmanlike and less political. Here are a couple of snippets of text that appear on the landing page:

Just the Facts: Top Five Reasons the Democrats’ “New” SCHIP Bill Is Actually More of the Same

Setting The Record Straight: Speaker Pelosi Misleads on SCHIP

House FISA Legislation the Wrong Direction for Our National Security

I guess it makes sense that an embattled administration would use its most relevant internet presence to further it’s goals. I still have to go back to the Wayback and see if the tone and layout was different before 2006…

I was mistaken, I looked at a page from September 1999 and there is one headline that is critical of the GOP…

GOP Tax and Budget Plan Could Force Drastic Cuts in Key Programs

I guess the goals consequent tone of this website is very dependent on the political landscape and also where they are in the election cycle.

…an unrelated item

I would guess that every multi-national company has someone, somewhere promoting a boycott of their products. There is an individual on a forum that I frequent advocating the boycott of Google. Not because of their dealings with the totalitarian State of China, but rather in response to the punitive nature of their page ranking system on bloggers.

I have an aunt who is an environmentalist from way back before it was cool. When I was visiting her in Toronto as a child in the mid 80s, she was boycotting EXXON. Boycotting huge companies that have a wide range of products can be a personal hardship. My aunt would drive past Exxon stations when she was close to empty and look around for an alternative. In the small community where I grew up, there is no alternative to Exxon.

Kraft is a great case study for boycotts. This is a huge company with almost countless different brand names. There have been boycotts against them for a wide variety of reasons, from their advertising of cigarettes aimed at children to their sponsorship of the Gay Games. If you are a consumer of processed foods, boycotting Kraft is very complicated. Oh, I should say that I think the AFA call for a Kraft Boycott in response to their sponsorship of the Gay Games is deplorable and ridiculous. A search on this subject reveals that criticism of the boycott and support of the Gay Games totally swamped the call for a boycott. Maybe the AFA should call for a boycott of Google for placing GoodAsYou.org higher in the search than the AGAPE Press. Why does the Christian website name sound gayer than the gay one?

One boycott that I support in principle, but probably fall well short of in practice is against the humongous food company Nestlé. The main thrust of this started in 1977 and the company has abandoned SOME egregious policies and practices in SOME regions and spent much money on defensive rebranding in various sectors of its enterprise in the interim. This is a very big issue and I encourage everyone to read about Nestlé.

The problem with boycotts is that the mass market is not as responsive to complicated messages as it is to simplistic advertising. Lobbying governments to impose restrictions on advertising can have a much larger effect. I read that Brazil has an outright ban on advertising of baby formula. One major issue that people have had with Nestlé is its aggressive marketing of formula to poor people who would be much better off breastfeeding. Brazil and other countries have also imposed labeling restrictions on baby formula.

I write for more than one blog and I almost always put my more personal or humorous items in my general blog. I have noticed that lots of A-list bloggers who focus on technology and/or business throw in the occasional whimsical aside. It makes the blog seem more human. I have decided to to this as well. If I run out of other stuff to do tonight, I may come back and edit this post so it includes some kind of business metaphor. Don’t count on it though.