Playboy and the Death of an Era

Looks like the only reason to read Playboy after next year will be the articles. But then again why buy a magazine to ogle beautiful nude women when you got an internet connection?

Playboy to Drop Nudity as Internet Fills Demand

Last month, Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, went to see its founder Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion.

In a wood-paneled dining room, with Picasso and de Kooning prints on the walls, Mr. Jones nervously presented a radical suggestion: the magazine, a leader of the revolution that helped take sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous, should stop publishing images of naked women.

Mr. Hefner, now 89, but still listed as editor in chief, agreed. As part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses. But they will no longer be fully nude.~snip~

The print media has found itself having to cede to the internet and the way it has changed peoples consumption of news and entertainment.
Satellite and cable will eventually do so also, kicking and screaming all the way.

Ray Kroc's Curse on America

There are times I believe I should stay off facebook because some of the stuff posted there is beyond vapid.
Every once in a while you'll read about someone condemning McDonald's over the obesity epidemic in America.
As always it starts out with the typical class warfare evil corporation crap bemoaning the profits Mickey D's makes while trying to kill it's customer base from heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer and just plain clogging arteries.

I'm old enough to remember when the McDonald's menu was:

• Hamburger
• Cheeseburger
• Fries
• Vanilla or Chocolate Shake
• Coke

In all that time, through the 60's to now I have never seen anyone force anyone else to eat at McDonald's at gun point......not once.
When I was a kid growing up some of the things we didn't have was X-Boxes, Nintendo, hundreds of channels on cable TV or the Internet.
We had parents who would shoo us out of the house and told us to find something to do.
So we did, we played baseball and football, hide and seek, tag, shoot em up, and wrestling.
We explored the neighborhood, sometimes got in fights and then made up an hour later. When we got older we mowed lawns for money, hired ourselves out to widows and older ladies to do chores or gather empty soda bottles for the refund.
Seems we always had a little money and frankly I don't remember being bored very long.

I know, it sounds positively medieval, but I don't remember very many obese kids either.
That's why I roll my eyes every time I read about someone blaming Mickey D's because their kids are fat.
Maybe they just need to shoo them out of the house and find something to do.

The Cable Provider Carnival

Just a little change here on what to rant about.
Last night I got one of those survey calls from COX as a follow up on a service call they did a few days prior to replace a malfunctioning modem that they sold me about a month before.

I could go on about that and the fact that it's the second modem I've gotten since the one I had for about four years died on me.
To add insult to injury the "survey" was one of those female mechanical voices that expected me to "answer" questions for it.
Hey COX, I'm not going to sit here and answer any questions into a mechanical device, what idiot would?
I'm a human being and if you want to show that you value your customers like the little robotic voice says you do then you'd have a real live human contact me to ask questions.

It's not like you can't afford it, you over charge out the backside for just about everything you offer. Which is why the only service I buy from you is the high speed Internet. I can get all the TV I need from Netflix and Hulu plus at about a quarter of what you charge.
If you're wondering why you're losing subscribers you may want to rethink your business model, and try to treat your customers like they matter.