This is cool.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
Fun on the farm
We spent the weekend helping out on the farm. For those who missed it – my in-laws are on a property outside Dalby that flooded twice in the last month. The flood destroyed a crop – and a bunch of stuff that was kept in storage around the place, some electrical bits and pieces in the sheds, but mercifully spared one crop and the house.
The crop that didn’t fare so well presented a problem – it doesn’t really have any value, and is now in the way. The good side of the flooding is that all the soil on the farm has a full water profile (which means it’s wet to about ten inches or something and great for growing stuff). Farmers these days like to plant on top of the stubble of the old harvest because that provides nutrients for the new crop. To cut a long story short – the decision was made to burn the old crop (which actually didn’t go so well – it didn’t want to burn) before it turned out that it was actually fairly easy to take the planter through the ruined canary, planting new stuff over the top of it. The canary should shed its seeds on the field – which will then grow next winter…
Our biggest job while we were there was moving the massive centre pivot irrigator from one field to another.
Your Weekly Facebook Infographic: Facebook v Twitter
This is a little old. But it’s an interesting comparison. At one point Farmville had more users on Facebook than the entire Twitterverse.
Via Walyou.
Hey guess what. I started another blog
I figured it was time to put all my blogging talk into action. This one even has ads. I’ve picked a niche (coffee) and I’m out there to see just how much free stuff running a coffee blog can score me (I heard Izaac’s Pixar blog scored him free DVDs).
Plus it’s fun having a purpose when you go to cafes. And it makes all that time spent reading about coffee seem worthwhile.
Here it is. It’s called thebeanstalker.com. Add it to your feed reader. Tell your friends. Tell them to tell their friends. There has been a little bit of original content over there already – but expect to see some of my coffee posts from here posted there, and good stuff from there occasionally posted here.
Money for something, and your kicks for free
Dave Miers is raising money so that kids can drink clean water in India. You should help him meet his target of $2,000. He’s got $600 left. For one day only – if you donate money to his fundraising cause and tell me (I’ll check) I’ll send you 250gm of freshly roasted coffee for every donation of $30 or more. I’ll even buy and roast some Indian Coffee for the occasion.
Here’s the direct link to the donation page. Here’s the link to a post on his blog.
I think it’s a good cause, and I’m happy to support it. I do like the poetry of supporting clean water in India by offering to dirty yours.
Crying over cheap milk
A long long time ago I posted about milk prices. I suggested they were too high. Or that people should complain about them, rather than about the price of petrol. Milk, is, afterall, completely renewable.
Image Credit: Flickr
Now. I know farmers work hard to earn a living. And I hate that their prices are essentially controlled by our retail duopoly. And I know the margins are pretty low in milk farming because they are being, no pardoning of this pun, milked for every drop.
But I don’t share the dairy lobby’s angst when it comes to the price of milk (see another story where they call price drops “un-Australian”) in Coles and Woolworths (Update: Franklins and Aldi have joined the price war).
The supermarkets are having a price war. So what. This happens all the time in retail. But when it comes to milk, and the price of milk, this is a useful pawn in an economic game. Milk prices are determined by a contractual arrangement. And the contracts are up for renegotiation soon. That’s all these calls to boycott Coles and Woolies milk are. And they’re a little dumb.
Using milk as a loss leader to attract customers (and promising that they’ll wear the costs of dropping the price, rather than the farmers). Now, I am all for lobby groups looking to protect their interests. That’s how capitalism works. So I think it’s great that the dairy guys are out their suggesting Coles and Woolworths won’t wear the cost of a price drop for long. But this argument kind of misses the point of loss leading.
I’m sure the big two would love to have the farmers making no profit on their labours at all – but what they wouldn’t like – is for all the milk farmers to go out of business at once. Leaving them with no supply. Loss leading is essentially a marketing tactic, and I’d hope (perhaps naively) that the cost of dropping the price of milk to $1 a litre, is coming from the marketing side of the supermarket budget, rather than the procurement side. Choosing a staple product like milk to fight with a competitor who in just about every sense offers an identical product is a great move.
Unless there are farmers out there who like selling their milk at below cost (and already the lobby groups seem to be making noise about that being unsustainable) – I’d say the big two will wear the costs for so long as it is making them money to do so. There is no benefit to them if the milk industry dries up. There is benefit to them if they steal market share off one another. They’re targeting each other. Not the farmers. Obviously they want to cut down their overheads as much as possible – but it’s not a particularly sustainable business practice to be running your suppliers out of business in a price war. The whole idea of a loss leader is that they lose money there because nobody just goes to the Supermarket to buy milk, but they might pick one supermarket above the other if their milk is cheaper. It’s marketing. The money to do this probably comes out of a marketing budget.
If they figure out how much they’ll lose selling milk at below cost for a year (say 30c a bottle) and how much profit they’ll make per customer gained, across their whole basket or trolley of goods (say $50) then it’s a pretty simple question to answer… the idea that this will be passed on down the chain is a bit odd – especially since it’s only on their branded lines and the prices of the other, no doubt more popular milk (based on observation at the fridge in the supermarket) have not changed (as far as I know). This is just two companies trying to one up each other to get customers through the door. It’s marketing.
How to fight this battle
Calling giving the average Australian a bargain “un-Australian” is not a winsome PR strategy. It looks like whinging and whining. If the milk lobby really wants to fight against these chains, if they really want to hurt the supermarkets, they should team up with butchers and greengrocers and urge people not to boycott Coles and Woolies milk, but rather to embrace this as a chance to hit them in the hip pocket. If you want to punish them for being “Un-Australian” you should be encouraging people to snap up the cheap milk and buy nothing else from them in protest. The milk industry should embrace this as an opportunity for people to rediscover the joy of drinking milk. Start promoting making milkshakes at home. And then encourage people to get their veggies from a fruit market and their meat from a butcher – and see how long this lasts.
Coffee Out the Nose Funny: David Thorne’s American snow trip adventure
There are very few things in this world that are genuinely laugh out loud funny when you’re reading them in your head. David Thorne’s delightfully nasty bits of revenge, posted online for the world to see, are up there with the best of them.
David went to a ski shop in the US. The service was less than adequate. The gloves he purchased, that he was assured were waterproof, were not. They got wet, and the black ink that provided their ebony colour ran. And it ran all over his jumper. And when he went back to exchange them the staff abused him. So this is what he did:
The store received 5,000 calls enquiring about the free snowboard. And this email exchange ensued.
It was at this point in the exchange that coffee shot through my nostrils:
“I should probably be thankful that your staff were too occupied with having their earlobes stretched by Tonka-truck tyres and wearing pants around their knees to sell me a snowsurfingboard made of sugar or goggles made of bees.”
Or perhaps this point:
“Also, I apologise. While the average male height of 5″9 statistically means anything under is considered short, my question was without diminutive intention. I’m sure there are many advantages to being so small. Target carries an excellent range of boys clothing at competitive prices and a lower centre of gravity should, once helped up onto the ski-lift, allow you to snowboardsurf with greater stability. If I were small, I would buy a cat and ride it.”
There is, as is often the case with Thorne’s work, a language warning attached. It didn’t end all that well. Thorne punctuated the exchange with this:
Shirt of the Day: No fear of Dirt
Don’t fear dirt. Embrace it. Every white shirt I ever owned ended up looking like this anyway, so you may as well make it deliberate. Right?
From Threadless.
What do you get if you combine the Matrix, Transformers, Terminator and Voltron?
Answer: Something like this:
Life imitating blog: why you should work hard in science
A few days ago I posted this little cartoon to exhort you, my dear readers, to work hard on learning science stuff. So that you could ride cloned prehistoric animals. Because that’s where it’s at. You’ve got two Pterodactyls and a Microsaurus…
Well, anyway, it turns out that in life imitating Jurassic Park, the Wooly Mammoth will be available for your riding pleasure in a matter of years. Maybe.
A guy named Doctor Akira Iritani wants to impregnate an elephant with a baby mammoth.
He intends to use Dr Wakayama’s technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones
The nuclei will then be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth.
From the Telegraph.
How not to teach children to give generously
I’m not sure that stealing somebody’s money and giving it to the church is going to engender a spirit of generosity. What do you reckon.
GOD’S MUSCLE! from EIT! on Vimeo.
Apparently Peter is a standover man.
Old Skool Christian Music
You know that song about being to young to march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry or shoot the artillery… here’s what happens if some adults make a film clip for it.
That sort of thing just doesn’t age well. I’m sure it was the coolest thing out back in the 1970s.