Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2013

Portland’s tainted $2 bills

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:32

Last year there were a large number of red-stained $2 bills circulating in Portland, Oregon. Mary Emily O’Hara investigated the situation:

The manager at the McDonald’s on Northwest Yeon Avenue glanced at the money in the customer’s hand, a $2 bill that looked as if its edges had been dipped in blood. He grew tense, shook his head and turned away.

“Oh, no,” he says. “We’re not allowed to accept those.”

McDonald’s employees had seen the mystery money before — crimson-stained, smeared, always $2 bills — as have food carts, bars, retail stores and other businesses across the Portland area.

The bills have amused some people and alarmed others, who aren’t sure if the stains come from real blood, if the cash is counterfeit, or if the bills were marked by an exploding dye pack during a bank robbery gone wrong.

Thousands of these tainted bills are in circulation around the city, but their source is no longer a mystery: They’re a marketing gimmick for Casa Diablo, a Northwest Portland strip club that is taking U.S. currency and smearing it with blood-red ink.

You’d think defacing the currency would be a problem for the government … and it is:

But the feds have taken a dim view of Zukle’s actions: It’s against federal law to deface U.S. currency with the intent to make it unusable.

WW has learned Zukle and Casa Diablo are now under investigation by the Secret Service. Jon Dalton, resident agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Portland office, tells WW the fact the bills are being rejected show Casa Diablo’s inking of the money violates federal law.

Dalton says his office has told Casa Diablo three times to stop handing out the tainted bills. He also says his office has prepared a cease and desist order and is consulting with federal prosecutors about criminal charges. (WW has also learned the FBI paid the bar a visit in February.)

H/T to Marginal Revolution for the link.

September 28, 2013

Google is “fighting stupid with stupid”

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

In Maclean’s, Jesse Brown looks at the rather dangerous interpretation of how email works in a recent court decision:

Newsflash: Google scans your email! Whether you have a Gmail account or just send email to people who do, Gmail’s bots automatically read your messages, mostly for the purpose of creating targeted advertising. And if you were reading this in 2005, that might seem shocking.

Today, I think most Internet users understand how free webmail works and are okay with it. But a U.S. federal judge has ruled otherwise. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled that Google’s terms of service and privacy policies do not explicitly spell out that Google will “intercept” users’ email (here’s the ruling).

The word “intercept” is crucial here, because it may put Google in the crosshairs of State and Federal anti-wiretapping laws. After Judge Koh’s ruling, a class-action lawsuit against Google can proceed, whose plaintiffs seek remedies for themselves and for class groups including “all U.S. citizen non-Gmail users who have sent a message to a Gmail user and received a reply…”. Like they say in Vegas, go big or go home.

[…]

An algorithm that scans my messages for keywords like “vacation” in order to offer me cheap flights is not by any stretch of the imagination a wiretap.

But Google has taken a different tack in their defence. If, they’ve argued, what Gmail does qualifies as interception, than so does all email, since automated processing is needed just to send the stuff, whether or not advertising algorithms or anti-spam filters are in use. This logic can be extended, I suppose, to all data that passes through the Internet.

You might call it fighting stupid with stupid, but I think it’s a bold bluff: rule us illegal, Google warns the court, and be prepared to deem the Internet itself a wiretap violation.

September 25, 2013

“SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE”

Filed under: Business, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

The Register‘s headline perfectly encapsulates the dispute between Oracle/American Express and a high-end strip club:

A San Francisco strip club is suing Oracle after the tech goliath refused to pay a $33,540 bill allegedly racked up on the company credit card.

Larkin Street’s New Century Theater has filed a lawsuit claiming a man — named in the legal paperwork as Jose Manuel Gomez Sanchez — slid into the sexy flesh-pit last year and partied through the night.

It’s alleged he used an Oracle-issued American Express card between 1am and 5am to pay for $16,490 of undisclosed services on 2 October — right in the middle of Oracle’s OpenWorld 2012 conference in the city — and then returned two days later to splurge $17,050.

According to the San Fran Chronicle, Oracle was not willing to settle the subsequent bill. The database giant, easing itself into the software-as-a-service market, declined to comment on the lawsuit, which was submitted earlier this month to the Superior Court of California in San Francisco. The next hearing will take place in February. Sanchez is named as a defendant along with Oracle.

I’m not a lawyer, but it strikes me as a bad idea for Oracle to dispute the charges on the Amex card unless there are strong indications of “creative” billing on the part of the strip club. Just because they disapprove of how their employee racked up the charges doesn’t mean they can stiff the vendor.

Corporate culture, entitlement and unearned benefits

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

I’ve never worked in the investment banking world, but even at the tech companies I’ve worked for over the years, I saw smaller versions of the kind of behaviour that Chris Tell says are sure-fire signs of a toxic corporate culture:

It was the late 90′s, markets were booming and the only thing that seemed to be flowing faster than the pints on a typical Thursday night in the city of London’s watering holes, was of course the money.

Living it up … great food, expensive cocktails — in fact the more expensive the better — that was the prevailing attitude. Never on your own dime of course.

This wasn’t unique to Lehman, who I was with at the time, or to any other bank for that matter. I contracted to a handful of the big names, and they were all abusers.

It was, and still is deeply ingrained in much of the investment banking corporate culture. It’s also been a cancer in many of the businesses I’ve researched over the years.

I now have zero tolerance for it as an investor and business owner, despite the fact that I was more impressionable when younger.

Back then, being young and naive, working for a fancy-pants IB, I was awestruck by my bosses spending hundreds of pounds in a drinking session. As I look back I’m embarrassed for thinking that these wealthy parasites where gods of some kind. The more they spent … the bigger an asshole they were … the more they were idolized and revered!

As far as I could tell most of my fellow inmates had applied to an ad that read something like: Arrogant, obnoxious, self-aggrandizing types being accepted now.

[…]

Humans have a desire for fairness but also love a free lunch. These two aspects work against each other.

Soon one manager sees another manager ordering lobster at lunch and thinks to himself, “Screw it, if he’s getting it so should I.” Rapidly a culture of entitlement develops where mysteriously, corporate travel, apartments, dinners, drinks and other things that have little to no ROI start burning up the expense accounts. These folks rarely stop to consider the impact of their actions, while somehow believing that they have “earned it” and indeed “deserve it.”

I was never able to put my finger on it at the time, but having subsequently spent the majority of my adult life researching and investing in early-stage businesses, I now have a keen eye for spotting this, and will never invest in businesses which allow this type of culture to gain footing.

Once let in the door it grows like a cancer and completely destroys shareholder value.

Incidentally, it’s not distinctly different to how career politicians view themselves. They actually believe that what the do, day in and day out is worth something more than it is. That it’s somehow more than just community service, and they should be compensated in the fashion that they (currently — hopefully temporarily) are.

September 22, 2013

“By far the worst thing about it is the title”

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:13

In the New Statesman, Felix Salmon reviews the latest book by Tim Harford:

Harford […] has a breezy writing style and an infectious sense of humour — but he doesn’t let himself go further than a sober, conservative economist would be comfortable going. He’s trustworthy in a way that most other commentators on economics aren’t. He is not particularly interested in political arguments or in imposing his views on others — instead, he just wants to explain, as simply and clearly as possible, the way in which the economics profession as a whole usually looks at the workings of the world.

Harford, like Levitt, is a microeconomist by training and by avocation; he is most comfortable when faced with questions such as: “Why does a return train ticket on British rail cost only £1 more than a single?” Hence his Undercover Economist franchise: the conceit is that he’s an economist spying on the world, explaining things — and answering readers’ questions — in a way that only an economist would.

With The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, however, Harford has taken a leap out of his microeconomic comfort zone. By far the worst thing about it is the title. There is none of the Undercover Economist about this book, unless you include the dialogue style of writing that Harford has perfected in his FT column. And he’s not striking back at anything at all: no entity was attacking him in the first place. Even the subtitle (How to Run — or Ruin — an Economy) is problematic. No one is going to come away from reading this book convinced that they know how to run an economy.

Instead, what Harford has achieved with his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics. While retaining the accessible style of popular microeconomics, he has managed to explain, with clarity and good humour, the knottiest and most important problems facing the world’s biggest economies today.

September 20, 2013

Not “lovingly crafted”, but made with craftsmanship

Filed under: Business, China, Randomness, Woodworking — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Sippican Cottage posted this the other day, and I have to admit I was vastly impressed with the skills of these workers:

That workshop has nothing that I don’t understand going on it it. It’s a very safe place to work, although the State of California would tell you that every single thing in it is known to give you cancer. But they say that about a glass of tapwater. The finish that the woman’s applying is shellac, which you can eat after is dries, and the glue pot is filled with hide glue, which is just horses that came in last, and most of the tools make wood shavings, not sawdust, and the sanding is done by hand, so the sawdust isn’t copious or particularly dangerous. No one in the video is missing a digit, or has any visible scars from working with their hands all day. They all have fans pointed at them, but that’s no doubt because it’s too warm for comfort wherever they are. That place is not full of toxic fumes. You’d pay money to smell the smells in there. Shellac and hide glue and wood shavings smell wonderful. I hear laughter in there, and people smile when a camera is pointed at them. It’s a sheepish smile I understand. They are not used to people being interested in their mundane life. No one is wearing safety glasses or ear protection, and no one needs them, either.

No one is LOVINGLY CRAFTING anything in the video, although the violins they make will be sold for huge money in Europe, and the customers will be told that their violins were… LOVINGLY CRAFTED. But then again, no one I’ve seen in five thousand LOVINGLY CRAFTED videos have one-tenth the hand skills I see demonstrated by everyone in the video. It’s important work to them, so they do it to the best of their ability. People that do things over and over get really good at them. I wish them all well — and hope on my best day, I’m as good as they are on their worst.

September 19, 2013

Easterbrook – The NFL should be called the “Nonprofit Football League”

Filed under: Business, Football, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

In The Atlantic, an excerpt from Gregg Easterbrook’s new book The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America, talks about the fantastic legal and financial advantages enjoyed by the National Football League:

In his office at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell must smile when Texas exempts the Cowboys’ stadium from taxes, or the governor of Minnesota bows low to kiss the feet of the NFL. The National Football League is about two things: producing high-quality sports entertainment, which it does very well, and exploiting taxpayers, which it also does very well. Goodell should know — his pay, about $30 million in 2011, flows from an organization that does not pay corporate taxes.

That’s right — extremely profitable and one of the most subsidized organizations in American history, the NFL also enjoys tax-exempt status. On paper, it is the Nonprofit Football League.

This situation came into being in the 1960s, when Congress granted antitrust waivers to what were then the National Football League and the American Football League, allowing them to merge, conduct a common draft, and jointly auction television rights. The merger was good for the sport, stabilizing pro football while ensuring quality of competition. But Congress gave away the store to the NFL while getting almost nothing for the public in return.

The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act was the first piece of gift-wrapped legislation, granting the leagues legal permission to conduct television-broadcast negotiations in a way that otherwise would have been price collusion. Then, in 1966, Congress enacted Public Law 89‑800, which broadened the limited antitrust exemptions of the 1961 law. Essentially, the 1966 statute said that if the two pro-football leagues of that era merged — they would complete such a merger four years later, forming the current NFL — the new entity could act as a monopoly regarding television rights. Apple or ExxonMobil can only dream of legal permission to function as a monopoly: the 1966 law was effectively a license for NFL owners to print money. Yet this sweetheart deal was offered to the NFL in exchange only for its promise not to schedule games on Friday nights or Saturdays in autumn, when many high schools and colleges play football.

Public Law 89-800 had no name — unlike, say, the catchy USA Patriot Act or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Congress presumably wanted the bill to be low-profile, given that its effect was to increase NFL owners’ wealth at the expense of average people.

While Public Law 89-800 was being negotiated with congressional leaders, NFL lobbyists tossed in the sort of obscure provision that is the essence of the lobbyist’s art. The phrase or professional football leagues was added to Section 501(c)6 of 26 U.S.C., the Internal Revenue Code. Previously, a sentence in Section 501(c)6 had granted not-for-profit status to “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, or boards of trade.” Since 1966, the code has read: “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues.”

The insertion of professional football leagues into the definition of not-for-profit organizations was a transparent sellout of public interest. This decision has saved the NFL uncounted millions in tax obligations, which means that ordinary people must pay higher taxes, public spending must decline, or the national debt must increase to make up for the shortfall. Nonprofit status applies to the NFL’s headquarters, which administers the league and its all-important television contracts. Individual teams are for-profit and presumably pay income taxes — though because all except the Green Bay Packers are privately held and do not disclose their finances, it’s impossible to be sure.

The LCBO’s new “Ontario Boutique” outlets – doing a Wal-Mart to Ontario wineries

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

In the latest Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus talks about the opening of three new “Ontario Boutique” LCBO stores. These stores are the LCBO’s response to rising demand for quality Ontario wines … opening stores to directly compete with the wineries.

Well it happened; the LCBO opened their Ontario Boutiques to great fanfare on September 12, in three cities: Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and Windsor … three places that have wineries nearby. Three places where the local populace could hop in their cars and within 15 minutes be at any of a dozen wineries in the area. The way we should all view this is the LCBO utilized the Wal-Mart approach to competition: get in there and fight it out with already established businesses. According to reports, they are beautiful, well-stocked and something to see. Now, I’m not questioning whether or not the LCBO was going to do a nice job on these in-store boutiques, heck they have the money to sink into them (yours and mine), I question their location and I question why the Wal-Mart tactics?

[…]

Someone who did get it (Bob) emailed me directly, putting it very succinctly: “The Wine Council’s information shows that the majority of VQA wines are still sold at the wineries. I asked one of their staff why they were putting a new VQA [boutique] in the Glendale store in St. Catharines rather than Toronto, and was told that it was because they sold more VQA wine in that store than any other in their system. Obviously, they are intent on trying to steal as much business away from the local wineries as possible, and therefore to deny the wineries (for the most part Canadian small businesses) as much profit as possible.”

While another reader, Gaye, admitted she has finally seen the light: “I always took your rants re: the LC mildly, as I like being able to shop in the “biggest” importer of wines in the world (sic). But I love Ontario wines, and living in Toronto always bemoan the difficulty of going to Niagara wineries and driving back … for obvious reasons. So I thought these boutiques were inevitable and of course would be in the place most Ontario wine was drunk, Toronto. As your excellent wife said, “a no-brainer”. This is incredible, opening in Niagara Falls? As if our wine was just something to be sold to tourists. Now I’m totally on side.”

Latest online piracy study shows the problem is Hollywood

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick shows that the data in the most recent study of online piracy (funded by NBC Universal) clearly shows that the real reason for piracy is Hollywood’s unwillingness or inability to learn:

While we already discussed the MPAA’s questionable new study trying to pin the blame for infringement on Google, MPAA member NBC Universal has released its “Digital Piracy Universe” study as well. This study was done by NetNames, the company formerly known as Envisional, which basically released a very similar study two and a half years ago. Matt Schruers, over at CCIA, does a nice job explaining some of the more questionable aspects of the methodology. However, we’d like to focus on something a bit more basic: the study’s own numbers don’t seem to support what NBC Universal seems to think it does. More specifically, as we noted with the last study, the results actually suggest piracy is Hollywood’s own damn fault. This isn’t just our interpretation either. The guy who wrote both studies, David Price, basically said the same thing right before SOPA died (he argued that the bills were a bad idea).

Once again, it’s not difficult to see why the problem is Hollywood’s with one simple chart:

Online piracy and Netflix

Basically, in the US, where Netflix has come up with a model that many people find to be reasonably priced and convenient enough, the rate of things like BitTorrent usage falls in comparison.

After smartphones, genius machines?

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

In the Daily Beast, Robert Herritt reviews the latest book by Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Cowen’s main background assumption is that in the not-too-distant future various kinds of “genius machines” will be everywhere. In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions “will be recorded, processed, and analyzed [and] … [e]ach party to the communications might receive a real-time report on when the other people are likely lying …” At the supermarket, “[y]our shopping cart will use GPS to track your moves through the store, including which aisles you visit most often.” As for our personal lives, “[a] woman might consult a pocket device in the ladies’ room during a date that tells her how much she really likes the guy. The machine could register her pulse, breathing, tone of voice … or whichever biological features prove to have predictive power.”

Even a few years ago, this forecast would have sounded silly, but that was before many of us trusted Match.com algorithms to suggest potential spouses and smartphones came with fingerprint scanners. Cowen’s not talking about flying cars (that futurist mainstay that always seems both just out of reach and comically unnecessary), but rather slightly more sophisticated versions of the technologies that many of us already use.

The bad news, he tells us, is that the rise of the machines will only worsen the wage polarization we are seeing today. Cowen predicts a situation where 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans are “extremely wealthy” with “fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.” Most of the rest will see stagnant or falling wages but will benefit from plenty of “cheap fun and also cheap education.” For those wondering, this vanishing middle ground is where the book gets its catch-phrase title.

What will determine whether you end up a high earner or a low-wage left-behind will be, in large part, your answer to some variation on the following questions: “Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?”

September 18, 2013

Reason.tv: Detroit’s Operation Compliance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

“Someone breaks in, they never show up. Yet still, they want to come and blackball you and close your business,” says Derek Little, owner of an auto shop along Detroit’s Livernois Avenue.

He’s one of many business owners in Detroit who’s faced what he says amounts to harassment from the city’s overzealous code enforcement. Amidst a bankruptcy and a fast-dwindling population and tax base, the city has prioritized the task of ensuring that all businesses are in compliance with its codes and permitting. To accomplish this, Mayor David Bing announced in January that he’d assembled a task force to execute Operation Compliance.

Operation Compliance began with the stated goal of shutting down 20 businesses a week. Since its inception, Operation Compliance has resulted in the closure of 383 small businesses, with another 536 in the “process of compliance,” according to figures provided to Reason TV by city officials.

But business owners say that Operation Compliance unfairly targets small, struggling businesses in poor areas of town and that the city’s maze of regulations is nearly impossible to navigate, with permit fees that are excessive and damaging to businesses running on thin profit margins.

September 15, 2013

Back to school shopping fails to rescue the clothing chains

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

We all spent less than we were supposed to last quarter, and the clothing business is feeling tight:

Fantasies about a strong back-to-school shopping season had already gotten slammed when teen retailer American Eagle Outfitters, back in August, chopped its second-quarter earnings in half and confessed to lousy sales — down 2% overall and 7% on a comparable-store basis. CEO Robert Hanson blamed weak traffic and women who hadn’t bought enough of the stuff on the shelf. “The domestic retail environment remains challenging,” he concluded.

Competitor Abercrombie & Fitch reported its quarterly results the same day. While total sales were down “only” 1% year over year, booming international sales — up 15% overall and up 60% in China on a comparable store basis — papered over a debacle in the US, where sales plunged 8%. CEO Michael Jeffries summed up the US phenomenon: a “challenging environment,” “weaker traffic,” and “softness in the female business.” While “consumers in general” might be feeling better, he ventured, “that’s not the case for the young consumer.”

Alas, by today, his “consumers in general” had gotten the blues too, according to the University of Michigan/Thomson Reuters consumer-sentiment index. It plunged from 82.1 in August to 76.8 in September, the lowest since April. “Economists” on average had expected a flat 82 — they don’t get out much, do they? Particularly brutal was the collapse of the economic outlook index from 73.7 to 67.2, the lowest since January. So, a retail recovery in the second half? Maybe not so much.

September 13, 2013

The fatal challenge facing Apple and Samsung – boredom

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski speculates that we’ve hit PEAK SMARTPHONE:

Apple’s keynotes seem to command more mainstream front-page press attention than ever before — but each time, there’s less and less to report. Is the modern smartphone era limping to a close?

Apple’s announcements on Tuesday about the iPhone 5S and 5C were wearily predictable. Cupertino just doesn’t seem to be where the action is any more.

It is almost as if Apple and its arch-rival Samsung have exhausted themselves by suing each other around the world — and now look like two very knackered boxers agreeing to shuffle their way through the remaining rounds to the bell, rather than risk throwing big punches.

[…]

But the warning signs are there. Samsung reportedly held “crisis talks” this after sales of the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its expectations, Apple iPhone sales have declined for the past three quarters, and, well, “Peak Apple“.

Samsung piled on gimmicky and slightly creepy features like eyeball tracking, simply because it could. Apple’s user-facing innovation (the A7 64-bit chip is the real star of the show) entails building in a fingerprint scanner — a commodity laptop part for the past 10 years. Indeed, the only “radical” moves by Apple are adding colours to a slightly cheaper (but certainly not cheap) iPhone and rejecting NFC (or “Not F*cking Connecting”, as it’s known around here), which is a technology flop. Not so radical, then.

The stark truth is that smartphones, like computers, were only ever a means to an end — and once the services and apps markets matured, the smartphone itself became less … important. It didn’t really matter what access device you were carrying. The PC reached a point where the devices became beige boxes competing on price, and the smartphone era is drawing to the point where it doesn’t really matter what black rectangle you’re carrying — provided it accesses the services and apps you want. Fetishising the access devices is as strange as thanking LG or Panasonic for creating BBC2. No wonder both Samsung and Apple are looking at new higher-margin peripherals such as watches.

September 8, 2013

Sometimes the worst possible thing for you is to dominate your market

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Charles Hugh Smith on the dangers of being too big in your own market:

Microsoft is a case study in dominance leading to incompetence and catastrophe. Within the moat of near-monopoly/dominance, competence dwindles to the ability to keep doing what worked spectacularly well in the past, and keeping bureaucratic infighting and divisional rivalries down to a dull background erosion of initiative and talent.

Doing more of what succeeded spectacularly in the past works until it doesn’t, at which point doggedly pressing on with the old formula of success leads to catastrophic failures.

Nokia and Blackberry are recent case studies, but the rise of Google Chrome and smart-phone/tablet computing is beginning to threaten Microsoft’s core business of being the utility monopoly in the PC space.

Dominance means leaders and employees alike lose the ability to experience risk. The customer will take what is delivered, regardless, for the simple reason that alternatives are either unavailable or cumbersome.

[…]

Dominance in any space breeds complacency and enables the luxuries of political squabbling, sclerosis and loss of focus. Competence becomes incompetence, and the infrastructure that fosters creativity and flexibility — that is, a keen appreciation of risk and spontaneity — is slowly dismantled.

That applies not just to corporations but to governments, nations and empires.

H/T to Zero Hedge for the link.

September 7, 2013

The online life of the professional athlete

Filed under: Business, Humour, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

Chris Kluwe has a bit of experience as both a professional athlete and as a social media guru. Here’s some advice from him on how other professionals should handle their Twitter feeds:

When you’re a professional athlete on social media, there are certain unspoken rules (I lied, some of them are spoken in media meetings) you’re expected to abide by. The team (or company, really) wants you to be engaging, because that draws interest and boosts ticket/jersey sales, but it’s best if you’re only engaging on innocuous subjects. Teams really like it when you tweet “Rise and grind” each morning, or “gr8 day wth my tmmates, gettin that work in,” or “TEAM PROMOTIONAL ACTIVITY GOES HERE” — because it’s seen as the pinnacle of wit, you’re interacting with fans, and above all, it’s comfortably inoffensive (except, perhaps, to those with a dislike of the redundant and an appreciation of spelling and grammar, but no one really cares about those people, amirite?). Michael Jordan’s famous quote holds even more true today than it did in the ’90s:

“Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

You see, we’re in the business of selling you entertainment! We’re also in the business of selling you everything that goes along with entertainment, like sneakers, and jerseys, and sweatsuits, and mini-helmets, and commemorative plates, and cars, and alcohol… well, you get the idea. The funny thing about entertainment companies is that without fail, they want to grab the biggest slice of the pie they can, and the pie is biggest when it’s watered down and spread out and so generic that anyone can stomach a bite. It might not taste like much, but it sure is easy to keep choking it down the old gullet.

What teams don’t like is spice. Flavor. Something that makes people angry, gets folks riled up. They hate to see those messages that could possibly alienate a buyer, no matter how odious that buyer’s views may be.

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