Category: Uncategorized

Photo from Mark Hamill’s Instagram. Click to see the source.

“I’m sure Master Yoda was a lot easier to piggyback than you are, Master Luke.”

You don’t have to be the Governor of Florida to have an uncomfortable Starbucks moment, as an unidentified customer in St. Augustine discovered. He ordered a grande white chocolate mocha as part of a larger office order, which was picked up by a co-worker. In the space where Starbucks employees add the (often misspelled) name of the person who ordered the drink or some kind message was the line “Diabetes here I come”. The cup in question is pictured above.

Considering how many times Starbucks baristas mangle common names, I’m sort of impressed that this one spelled “diabetes” correctly.

In an interview with Action News Jax, who kept his identity secret, the customer said that “That first word just automatically brought the picture of both sisters in my head, and I was taken aback. Just the struggles they went through and all the doctor appointments they had.”

The customer sent the cup back with this message:

I’ll admit that I would’ve laughed had I received such a message on my cup, and my dad died from diabetes-related complications. Mind you, that was ten years ago; I can’t say with certainty that I would’ve laughed had it been ten days ago. My guess is that I would have, but I’m just “armchair quarterbacking” at this point.

In case you were wondering, here’s the nutritional information on a grande white chocolate mocha:

It has 58 grams of sugar, which is 4 grams more sugar than in two Snickers bars. Without the whipped cream, it has 400 calories; with the whipped cream, that number gets boosted to 470. It is, as Cookie Monster would put it, a “sometime food”.

That being said, the Starbucks employee behind the message, if s/he’s still with the company, should follow the same customer service policy as the one observed at “adult stores” everywhere: help the customer, and don’t judge. Whether it’s drinks or dildos, it doesn’t matter if the customer likes them big, brown, and over-accessorized — just make the sale and keep your comments to yourself.

Yup, that’s an actual, undoctored photo of Florida Governor Rick Scott.

On Tuesday, April 5th, Florida Governor Rick Scott stepped into a Starbucks in Gainesville, where he ran into unhappy constituent Cara Jennings. She launched into a tirade against the governor, which including calling him “an asshole” and “an embarrassment to our state”, which was captured by a quick-witted Starbucks patron (who, for bonus points, also shot the video in the proper horizontal format) who posted it onto YouTube where it went viral. At the time of this writing, it has over 2.1 million views. It’s the first of the two clips in my video below:

Scott left the Starbucks in a hurry without getting the coffee he came for. His response came on Friday on his official YouTube channel in the form of an attack ad against Ms. Jennings. It’s the second clip in the video above, and it’s the first time I can recall where a government official has made an attack ad against a private citizen.

Politifact’s analysis of Jennings’ rant

Politifact looked at the three big claims in the exchange in the first video; here’s what they wrote:

• Cutting medicaid (Jennings): half true. Scott didn’t cut medicaid, but he refused to accept the provision of the Affordable Care Act (often called “Obamacare”) that would expand Medicaid to cover almost an additional million Floridians (according to the Kaiser Family Foundation). While Floridians who make 1 to 4 times the amount of money defined as the poverty level can get subsidies to buy private insurance, those who are worse off but not the worst off — these people make somewhere between 44% of the poverty level and just below the poverty level — can’t these subsidies. An estimated 567,000 people fall into this “coverage gap”.
• Creating 1 million jobs (Scott): mostly true. Politifact reports that “between December 2010 and February 2016, total nonfarm employment in Florida rose by 1,041,400.” They’re also quick to point out that “It’s a stretch for the governor to claim credit for such gains. Governors can have an impact on their state’s economy, but there are other things they don’t control that can have impacts that are at least as big if not bigger, such as fluctuations in the national and world economy, population changes, and natural disasters.”
• Women’s health cuts (Jennings): half true. Politifact: “Scott signed a law this year that cuts off state funding for any clinic that provides abortions, including Planned Parenthood… The cut targets abortion clinics, so it isn’t a cut for health care offices that don’t provide the procedure, such as county health departments. There is some truth to the statement, but it’s too soon to tell exactly how the law will curtail women’s access to publicly supported health care.”

The attack ad

An actual still from the attack ad.

It would’ve been fine for Scott to simply release an ad that simply countered Jennings’ assertions, but that’s not the way U.S. politics works anymore. There’s no longer any room for compromise or finding solutions that most people can live with; it’s a zero-sum game where the philosophy seems to be “I cannot truly win unless you lose as well”.

That seems to be the approach that Scott (and Let’s Get to Work, Scott’s political action committee, who sponsored the ad) are taking. In addition to citing offenses such as a refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (horrors!) and calling herself an anarchist (the Republicans are about small government and anarchists are about no government; you’d think they’d have lots of common ground), the video ends by suggesting that the only people who in Florida who don’t have jobs are those who “sit around in coffee shops, demand public assistance, surf the internet and curse at customers”. Not everyone who’s at Starbucks in the middle of the day is loafing — I work out of a cafe once a week, and I’m a systems analyst; Jennings was there on her computer doing freelance work.

The points in the response video are fine. The ad hominem attacks that come with it are a petty, unnecessary addition to the video, and all it does is worsen an already toxic political climate.

Bonus reading material: How to respond to angry people on blogs, YouTube, and other social media

The U.S. Air Force has had a set of publicly-available rules of engagement for this sort of thing since 2008. It might be a good idea to emulate them, especially the part about tone: “Respond in a tone that reflects highly on the rich heritage of the Air Force”.

 

Photo by Violet Blue, found via Joi Ito.

Last week, Mossack Fonseca was a name unknown to most people who don’t need to squirrel money away in shell corporations. With the release of the Panama Papers, they’re now a household name, and not in the good way. Now you can buy the completely unauthorized T-shirt for $25 at RedBubble.

The Onion may have been playing it up for laughs when they wrote the article titled Billionaire Reading Name In Panama Papers Totally Forgot He Even Had Funds In Seychelles, but like some of their best articles, there’s a surprisingly big nugget of truth in it.

Fidelity Investments did a study of their customers’ investment accounts that performed the best, and one key factor they had in common was that their owners had forgotten about them. Or at the very least, the customers acted as if they’d forgotten about them and simply left them alone.

A lot of this stems from the fact that by and large, we’re terrible at investing. The chart below shows the performance of the “average investor” was below most markets. Even cash — in the form of 3-month T-bills) did better:

It may seem weird to get real-world-applicable truth from a comedy site, but remember that these days…

Found via TJ Fixman. Click the photo to see the source.

Seriously, it’s hard to tell the difference between the guy above and the guys in the video below…