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Alps drips dipping Rhine

With all honor to Vic, but something else loves the Alps but hates the snow:

After a prolonged summer drought, the bustling traffic at one of the shallowest points on the Rhine ground to a halt for nearly a month late last year, choking off a critical transport artery. The impact damped Germany’s industrial machine, slowing economic growth in the third and fourth quarters. It was the latest sign of how even advanced industrial economies are increasingly fighting the effects of global warming.

and

With its source high in the Swiss Alps, the Rhine snakes 800 miles through the industrial zones of Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands before emptying into the sea at Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest port. It serves as a key conduit for manufacturers such as Daimler AG, Robert Bosch GmbH and Bayer AG.

When low water halted shipping this summer, steelmaker Thyssenkrupp AG was forced to delay shipments to customers like automaker Volkswagen AG as it couldn’t get raw materials to a mill in Duisburg.

Though not nearly as important a commercial waterway, we saw this on the Elbe during the summer of 2015. ‘What did we think would happen?’ is being displaced by ‘what do we do now?’ Imagine an average teenager in a ‘borrowed’ car, three drinks more than he’s used to, dashed from the drive-through without paying but not before dinging the BK awning and hitting the highway, sees a patrol car pass in the opposite the direction, hit the lights and squall a U-turn. Our answers in a pinch of what’s best to do next might not be the most trustworthy. If we had planned for this, sure, we probably would have had the drinks but maybe not taken the car so no dine-n-dash, cops or DUI fender scuffs. But we did do all those things, in that order, the lights are flashing and sirens blaring. So what do we do now? Our lines are open, higher-than-normal rates apply.

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Enhanced Logo Techniques

plantNikeThese embroidered sportswear logos are a good reminder about all the personal space we willingly hand over to corporate advertising, and that we have the ability to take some of it back. Reclaim – hey, we’re into vintage!

The willingness to advertise products and brand loyalties needs some thoughtful push back. Adbusters is still around, but less manifesto and more creativity is what’s called for, not telling people what to think or do – but to think and do. And maybe that’s a contradiction. Maybe those are one and the same. The freedom to do nothing, to not vote, not participate, remains one of our most powerful. But it is also can be powerfully turned against the interests of a free society. The ‘freedom fetish’ itself is a good example of this.

Art is still more powerful than vandalism, but just as threatening to the status quo.

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Fringe-Fi

So… even for an election season, the politics of the moment are coming unhinged; just read the last ten or twelve posts at TPM, a supposedly moderate newsy site, and you’ll see how covering the right is becoming a circus of crazy. Conventional thinking is gelling around the notions that

a) the Republican Party is the Tea Party

and b) whatever it’s called the GOP Confederate Party needs to disappear, and/or be replaced by something other than either one of those, for the good of the country.

But that’s… a bit of crazy in its own right, and we could definitely be being governed by majorities of those freaks (think endless investigations of trivial scandals and government shutdowns) after this fall. Nonetheless… Green. What do it mean? How about your crappy internet service? Don’t think its so crappy?

The Connectivity Scorecard is, as Stacey Higginbotham reports for GigaOM, a favorite measure of the telecom industry, since it paints the America in a particularly favorable light.

The Scorecard looks not just at broadband infrastructure, but also at how a country uses its broadband, and how much that helps its economy. So while the United States has less and slower broadband than many Asian and European countries, it was the top rated country on the Scorecard until this year.

But as this chart emphasizes, U.S. broadband is far less advanced than that of leading countries. Despite ranking the United States second, the report states: “While it has significantly more fiber and DOCSIS 3.07 deployment than most of Western Europe, US infrastructure is uneven, and the gap with respect to Asian economies and even Sweden and the Netherlands remains substantial.”

Is there a connection? Sorry. Expect more. Before it becomes a corporate logo. Damn.

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Crisis parody

More good examples for new and improved corporate logos, here.

Sometimes ridicule goes a long way, unless the targets (as I’ve come upon recently – and locally) insist on being deliberately obtuse such that the meaning of your critique continues to (magically) escape them. Of course, I accept this failure as none other than my own.