Titans of Industry category archive

Honest to Pete, you can’t make this stuff up.

Full Disclosure:

When I lived in Comcast territory, my Comcast service was excellent. But that was then . . . .

The professor in the interview tries to be scientifically accurate, so his comments are ponderous and heavily footnoted (listen to the interview all the way through to understand why I say that). If you want to get to the gist, skip to the four-minute mark.

Guarantees optional.

Jim Hightower remarks on the beer industry’s response to the growth of “craft beers.” A nugget.

. . . not surprisingly, while the sales of Big Beer’s fizz are declining, the craft brewers are up by 17 percent last year alone. And the number of craft brewers has nearly doubled since 2010.

The giants have noticed… and are responding. By making better beer? Don’t be silly. Instead, they’re trying to co-opt the good name of local beer makers and dupe consumers by pretending that the likes of Bud and Miller are “craft” brewers, too. How?

Follow the link to count the ways.

Gayle A. Sulik of Denton, Texas, explains why she voted for a successful referendum to ban fracking in Denton. Here’s a bit, in which she describes the frackers’ tactics:

In the months leading up to the election, the fracking industry and its supporters used fear mongering extensively in an attempt to deter Denton citizens from voting for the ban. From jeopardizing American security to irresponsibly affecting the financial health of our schools, fear was used strategically to engender a visceral response while distracting attention from lax regulation, threats to human health, potential drop in property values, contamination of air, soil, and water, and the other concerns Denton citizens had been raising for years. Those who dared oppose fracking in this city of 123,000 citizens, thriving atop a gas-rich shale formation, were stigmatized as the rotten apples of Texas.

As a sociologist, the phenomenon was fascinating. As a citizen and resident, it was scary to see a politically supported industry focus its attention so squarely on putting the kibosh on informed enfranchisement.

Well, this answers a question:

AT&T Mobility, the nation’s second-largest cellular provider, says it’s no longer attaching hidden Internet tracking codes to data transmitted from its users’ smartphones. The practice made it nearly impossible to shield its subscribers’ identities online.

The change by AT&T essentially removes a hidden string of letters and numbers that are passed along to websites that a consumer visits. It can be used to track subscribers across the Internet, a lucrative data-mining opportunity for advertisers that could still reveal users’ identities based on their browsing habits.

Verizon Wireless, the country’s largest mobile firm, said Friday it still uses this type of tracking, known as ‘‘super cookies.’’ Verizon spokeswoman Debra Lewis said business and government customers don’t have the code inserted. There has been no evidence that Sprint and T-Mobile have used such codes.

Now we know which of these venal vendors is the venalest of all.

The food company Unilever (manufacturer of Hellman’s Mayonnaise–ed.) is suing a California company that uses the word “Mayo” in its sandwich spread name, saying that federal regulators and dictionaries define mayonnaise as a spread that contains eggs.

The suit claims false advertising by the company Hampton Creek for labeling its egg-free product “Just Mayo.” Unilever says in a complaint filed in federal court that the world mayo implies that the product is mayonnaise, and Just Mayo is “stealing market share from Hellmann’s.”

The product in question is no more mayonnaise than “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” (oh, yes, by the way, I can) is butter.

Our grocery aisles are full of artificial crap pretending to be real crap. I hope Unilever wins.

Also, forget Hellman’s. Dukes rules.

Read the NYT article.

Via Brendan.

Corporate twits.

Daniel Ruth dukes it out.