brand – Alan Flurry

April 12, 2023

When business meets a better business idea: Think about it

I’m familiar with Slutty Vegan and while not quite a fan – all the yelling, not sure I get that – the concept is solid and the burgers are good. And whatever one may think about the sustainability of meat and particularly the way we ‘farm’ chickens at this point, ‘They pull their little beaks off’ is actually a thing, no matter how you may or may not feel about it. And of course, the practice has far worse ethical issues.

SV founder and CEO Aisha “Pinky” Cole elaborates on her plan to exploit this fact to continue building her business (paywalled):

When you get an order of chicken wings, how many chickens is that? Two and a half? Two? What? And how old are they? Are these babies? Are they middle-aged? Are they wealthy? Are they poor? I wanna know: Where are these chickens coming from? And how are y’all able to produce so much, so fast?

I stopped eating meat altogether in 2007. I got food poisoning after I went to a restaurant. I had a chicken sandwich, and I got super sick. I was like, “That’s it. I’m not eating no more meat.” A little shy of 10 years ago, I went cold turkey and never turned back. When I went vegan, I had a restaurant that sold meat. I was selling oxtails and jerk chicken. But I wasn’t in alignment because I didn’t eat it. So why was I selling it?

Veganism is closely associated to climate change and how it’s important to save the animals and make sure that you’re doing the right things so that animals can sustain. I started really researching those things and I’m like, “Oh, I have to use my voice a little bit differently.”

Fake burgers as lifestyle brand, y’all.

Do try to keep up.

All’s Fare in Love and Mass Transit

In honor of today’s Google doodle of the anniversary of the Eiffel Tower, a word from the fair city – more than a mot, several in fact, on encouraging more transit use and social integration:

What if it were possible to travel as much as you’d like by train or bus within Connecticut, from Stamford to New Haven, Hartford, New London, Waterbury, Danbury, Putnam, and hundreds of other towns, and then to travel within them, all on one transit fare card at the monthly price of just $76?

That’s what, in essence, will occur beginning in September in Île-de-France, the region that surrounds and includes Paris and which is practically the physical size of Connecticut—albeit far more populous and benefiting from a far more extensive transit system.

The plan is to eliminate the current five-zone transit fare system for people holding weekly or monthly passes and replace them with a universal, unlimited fare. The universal card will apply to virtually all transit services within Île-de-France, which is the most populous region in France, with 12 million inhabitants spread over 4,638 square miles (for comparison, the city of Paris proper has 2.3 million residents in 41 square miles, and New York City, which has a universal fare card for Subways and buses, is 305 square miles).

Meanwhile, back at the front… of moving forward with big ideas that help people and planet. Nearer the rear, let’s make sure we continue to wage the battle on whether high speed rail makes sense and against climate scientists lining their pockets with melting glaciers.

September 3, 2010

Truly Rapid Transit

While our friends on the right keeping yelling about how backwards, unsafe and unfreedom it is to not sit in your car alone and imbibe talk radio, our friends on the Right Bank are doing something other than idling on the way to work.

Yet the Réseau Primaire de Transport du Grand Paris (primary transport network of greater Paris) may be coming to life. This week, the government opened public debate on the project, revealing the extensive studies it has completed on potential alignments for the rail corridors, including proposed station sites. And the Sarkozy Administration has committed to €4 billion to the Société du Grand Paris, the semi-autonomous organization that will build the project and invest in eight major development sites that will have prime access to the network.

If the program is approved, the Société would take on 40 years of debt financing to sponsor the €21.4-23.5 cost, to be paid back mostly through deals made on real estate in station areas.

The project would encompass 155 km (96 miles) of new lines that would be added to the existing automated 5.5-mile Line 14 Metro that currently runs along a southeast-northwest route through Paris. Three routes would be offered: a 50 km Blue Line from Orly Airport to Charles de Gaulle Airport, via the existing Line 14; a 75 km Green Line from Orly Airport to Charles de Gaulle Airport, via the La Défense financial district west of Paris (with 21 km shared with the Blue Line); and a 60 km Red Line from La Défense to Le Bourget Airport, via the southern and eastern suburbs. Commute times for suburban residents hoping to reach destinations outside of Paris will be decreased significantly, with average train speeds a very respectable 40 mph thanks to few stations (give or take 40, depending on the final alignment chosen) and very high frequencies thanks to automation. At peak hours on some segments, trains will arrived every 85 seconds.

As Atrios points out, this project will cost about three months of Afghanistan, plus you get the trains at the end. And less dead people, at least theoretically.

And though that hurts, it’s not the real kicker. No, the further insult here is the constant badgering by the craven morons standing guard against this kind of progress. To hear mass transit constantly demonized in the U.S., one might think that the idea of not getting everywhere by private car represents the end of civilization as we know it. Well, you know what? It would! And not a moment too soon. Something’s got to change. But this is precisely where our confederate republican brethren have drawn the line – in calling this kind of change exactly what it is and opposing it for that very reason.

Maddening. But speaking of remaining calm in the face of staggering idiocy, the neighborhood around the Chatelet stop is a nice area.