Category: Consuming

Coffee ads

Some people thought the Dunkin’ Donuts “Doing things is what I like to do” ad was annoying because it depicted silly coffee-fueled enthusiasm and had a silly theme.

They will not like the new Folgers’ ad “Happy Mornings” either. You should watch it all the way to the end, for the tagline “Tolerate Mornings,” and the joyous choral repitition of the song’s chorus, “Wake up you sleepy head, you can sleep when you are dead!”

Insurance just isn’t the right model

If there is a one percent chance of any one car being stolen in Somerville, but nobody knows which car it is, the insurance market is good. But if an insurer can know in advance which car will be stolen, they won’t insure it. And if you wait until your car has already been stolen to buy insurance for it, you are committing insurance fraud.

This week I am buying health insurance. Health insurance makes sense if you have 100 people, each with an equal, but low, chance of having a heart attack or getting hit by a car and needing expensive care. But it makes very little sense to sell accident insurance to someone who just got hit by a car.

Nonetheless, that’s just what I’m doing. Because it’s health insurance that I am buying through my employer, I can get insured against chronic conditions I have already developed.

People who don’t have employers with health plans can’t get affordable coverage, and that’s horrible. Insurers, meanwhile, are stuck with freeloaders like me, which is unfortunate for them but deeply satisfying for everyone else. And until we fix the entire model, we seem to be stuck with this kind of situation where nobody is happy.

Work Profanity

I decided today that now that I’m employed I can swear on my blog again, so here is a post involving both work and profanity.

The Top Ten Sources parent company just bought Stylefeeder, which is a of multi-store wishlist, plus a way to share shopping lists, and also works as a way to browse for stuff that other people like. The revenue comes from affiliate programs.

It’s still got some kinks to work out– there’s bugs related to iframes and flash-heavy sites like the Icon Motorsports catalogue, but mostly it’s incredibly neat.

And then there’s the usual risks you run into when you let any random user add content to your site. I added my favorite Threadless shirt to my style feed and tagged it (accurately) as “Threadless t-shirt unicorns fucking.” The site dutifully added “fucking” as a keyword, and then suggested a link to Flickr photos tagged with the same word.

Still, it’s an incredibly neat site, and a lot easier to use than, say, Mugshot.

DTMFA

People in the Times are horrible: “[The East Hampton broker] described the frustrated wife, shopping for a $3 million summer home, who turned to her husband and uttered one line that said it all: ‘I wish you had a good job so we didn’t have to live like this.'”

DTMFA, dude. Seriously.