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Category: Business

A Slow, Uncomfortable Screw

With sparkles and feathers.

While I appreciate their attempts at sarcasm, I can’t get over the fact that these screwdrivers are prettier than this chick’s undies (when I stoop to wear ’em).

Believing that women will only use tools when said tools are pink, feathered, and sparkly, is just as dumb as thinking women won’t see through the unbelievable gall for finally giving the Nintendo classic’s Princess Peach her own video game and making her a manipulative, hormonal, diamond-grubbing wuss.

I Promise…

That I will never sell my soul for a couple bucks from a corporation, shill for that corporation on Feministe, and not disclose the fact that what I’m actually doing is just reproducing something sent to me by the company’s PR firm.

That would be wrong.

Well, *this* is going to put me right off omelets

An EPA advisory panel has identified a compound used in Teflon as a “likely carcinogen.”

I’ve known for some time that superheating a nonstick pan can kill your canaries, since it releases a toxic gas at high temperatures (which you can pretty much only achieve by turning the stove onto high and leaving an empty pan on the burner, but people do fuck up from time to time). But Teflon is used in all kinds of products, such as Gore-Tex fabrics and pizza boxes, not to mention stain protectors for fabrics and carpets.

But the worst thing about this is, surprise, surprise, the coverup. The company that makes Teflon — DuPont! — knew about this for quite some time:

The EPA is in the midst of a major investigation into how the compound, which is used to make stain- and stick-resistant surfaces and materials for products including Gore-Tex fabrics and pizza boxes, gets into consumers’ blood and whether it affects their health. It is also seeking millions of dollars in fines from DuPont Co., which makes PFOA in Parkersburg, W.Va., on the grounds that the chemical giant failed for 20 years to report possible health and environmental problems linked to the compound.

God only knows what the cancer rate among their employees is. Or whether they bothered to tell their employees of the potential dangers. That’s what got the asbestos companies in deep shit — they knew about the hazards of asbestos for decades before they got caught (in fact, the reason we have OSHA is due to the malfeasance of asbestos manufacturers). I did asbestos litigation for a while (my firm represented an insurance company that did industrial health stuff back in the 1930s, pre-OSHA), and the human toll is just incredible.

I still don’t know what motivates company management to try to suppress stuff like this. I’m sure everyone and their uncle is doing hard-core CYA rather than thinking long-term. But it’s almost always easier to deal with fallout when you admit error and ‘fess up quick. This was a lesson I learned quite early in my legal career, when presented with a senior partner who would lose his temper, but only when you’d really fucked up — to defuse things, all you had to do was say, “Mike, I fucked up. Let me know what I can do to fix it and I’ll learn not to do it again.” Hiding things just made it worse, because he’d find out eventually. That got one of my coworkers fired.

In any event, I own one non-stick pan, a rather nice Calphalon omelet pan I got for a great price using a friend’s employee discount. It doesn’t claim to be Teflon, and the material seems to be integrated rather than sitting on top of the pan, but I just don’t know. Probably won’t have omelets for a while.

Swill

Charming. Diet wine, pitched to women by playing to their insecurities:

This off-the-mark targeting reaches its full height with White Lie, Beringer Blass’ new lower-calorie, lower-alcohol wine for women. The marketing of this Chardonnay revolves around the maxim “a little white lie never hurt anyone.” Minor fibs like “My hair is naturally this color,” are printed on the red label under the White Lie name, in florid cursive, and an additional lie—”But it was on sale”; “I can’t wait for football season”—is offered on each cork. The company has even enlisted the talents of chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed; In Her Shoes) to pen an endorsement of the wine and judge its promotional short-story contest.

Great. It’s the Chick Lit of wines.

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Hot Geezers in Magazines

Well, they aren’t exactly elderly, but you’d think so by the way the Times writes about them.

Brace yourself. Very soon in beauty and fashion ads you will be seeing faces of women who are actually in their 40’s – or even older. If you look closely, you may even see a wrinkle or a line or two. Granted, these are not ordinary faces: Kim Basinger in the new campaign for Miu Miu; Sharon Stone, the image for Dior Beauty. These are extraordinary, storied, famous, perhaps even infamous, faces. Faces with staying power.

Ok, I’m braced — show me a wrinkle!

Now, I suppose this ad campaign is good. It’s great that we’re finally able to look at older women (sorry, but I don’t think 40 quite qualifies as “old”) and see that, by George, women don’t physically fall into pieces after their 16th birthdays. But the tone of this piece irritates me; it’s silly that we’re shocked, just shocked, at the idea that women over 25 can be beautiful enough to be put in advertisements.

Of course, it’s shitty that these women are basically being used to sell wrinkle cream and anti-aging potions. And I think that the reporter here is correct when she says that this is largely an economic decision, in response to shifting age demographics. But I’d like to eek out a little glimmer of hope, and say that this does also reflect a shifting beauty standard, where older women are still perceived as attractive. There are all kinds of problems with beauty standards in general, which I won’t touch on now, but this could be a tiny step in the right direction. Or, if not the right direction (because selling women useless crap in an attempt to make them look 20 isn’t exactly the “right” direction), at least a better direction. Thoughts?

Yet Another Reason to Hate Microsoft

Create a blog on MSN Spaces and Microsoft owns you.

From the MSN Spaces Terms of Use:

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a ‘Submission’), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission.

See Boing Boing for more info and links.

To top it off, MSN doesn’t allow profanity. Fuck that shit. “Whores” indeed.

I Heart PowWeb

I do love my host. I’ve been with PowWeb ever since I moved off of Blogspot, and aside from the Great Movable Type Debacle, I haven’t had any troubles with PowWeb at all.

After using MT for two years the blog got too big to handle and it had to be redone. With the help of two awesome people I was able to make the switch to WordPress rather smoothly.

Until today. *

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Supporting Section 8 & HUD

An article from my dear friend Sean, who works in the field, about Section 8 and housing for low-income Americans (HUD, for the unfamiliar, is Housing and Urban Development). Section 8 is a good program because it allows, among other things, a greater degree of neighborhood choice for the families it helps. It also encourages mixed-income housing, meaning that one building will have 90% of its units rented at full cost, and ten percent of them subsidized. Taking a step away from housing projects — which reinforce cyclical poverty, encourage crime and keep poor students at the worst schools — is a step in the right direction. I don’t know as much about this issue as I’d like to, so perhaps there will be more on this later.

Newsflash: Fox News Biased

Only this time it’s not in their coverage, it’s in the workplace.

The commission claims that a Fox vice president, Joe Chillemi, “routinely used gross obscenities and vulgarities when describing women or their body parts,” language that it says Mr. Chillemi “did not use with male employees.” The suit contends that Mr. Chillemi “routinely cursed at and otherwise denigrated women employees,” telling them to “be a man.”

The suit charges that Mr. Chillemi, in a discussion about a television segment focusing on sexism in the workplace, said, “Of course I’d pick the man” if he had to choose between a woman and a man for the same position, because he was concerned that a woman could become pregnant and leave her job. Mr. Chillemi is described in the suit as the supervisor of the Fox Advertising and Promotions Department.

Shocking, just shocking. via Gawker.