In the latest Reason magazine, Greg Beato argues that Starbucks (SBUX) is, at its heart, radical. In fact, it’s “still the most radical thing to hit the coffeehouse universe in the last 50 years.”

What it needs to do, Beato says, is to stop trying to be “radical,” and just be … radical. Because like “Seattle’s other great cultural export from the early 1990s, Nirvana, Starbucks has always been most vital, most interesting, most revolutionary when at its most commercial.”

This isn’t just Reason magazine gleefully commodifying its dissent—as it often does by holding up capitalism as some kind of subversive idea to piss off liberals. Well, it’s a little bit that, but it’s also a real argument. And it’s partly right.

Over the years, Starbucks has repeatedly tried to prove its indie cred or to position itself as more highbrow than it really is. But those efforts are always shallow, whether they consist of trying to be a ‘zine publisher or trying to be a crunchy purveyor of “small batch coffees sourced from individually owned farms,” as it’s doing now with its unbranded, ersatz-independent coffeehouses.

But the company succeeds best, as Beato notes, when it is at its most middlebrow. That’s its strength. But when it reaches for “authenticity,” rather than just being authentically itself, it fails. None of the chain’s strained efforts can “match the truly radical act of installing espresso machines in bank lobbies,” Beato writes.

Nor can they match Starbucks’ initial bit of radicalism: avoiding the downscale hipster neighborhoods where coffeehouses were proliferating in the early ’90s (thanks, in part, to the existence of Starbucks itself) in favor of middle class neighborhoods, downtowns, and suburban areas. Back then, founder Howard Schultz “made sure to put his stores in the direct path of lawyers and doctors, artists on trust funds and writers with day jobs as junk bond traders.” And he stayed away from “fringe places like, for instance, Chicago’s neobohemian Wicker Park.”

He’s right that this was radical. But he’s wrong that it still is. I happened to live in Wicker Park in the early ’90s, and I was glad there was no Starbucks there. Or rather, I would have been glad if it had ever crossed my mind that it was possible. I had plenty of access to great coffee at funky (if not truly radical) places like Urbis Orbis, which hosted slam poetry events and folk-music concerts and whatnot. It’s gone now.

So, too, is Wicker Park Dogs, a tiny purveyor of cheap, delicious, greasy burgers and giant sacks of fries that was housed right in the vortex of Wicker Park’s hipness, the corner of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. There’s a Bank of America (BAC) there now. Not so radical. And across street is … a Starbucks. Neighbors include a high-end women’s haberdashery that was once home to Sophie’s Busy Bee–a funky Polish diner that had been there for at least three different demographic revolutions in the neighborhood, from the Poles through the Hispanics through the arty, cash-poor hipsters. Once the yuppies had taken over in the mid- to late-’90s, there was little demand for Sophie Madej’s pierogi or pork knuckles, and she closed up shop.

All these places were far more “authentic” than Starbucks is now, whether in its original incarnation or in its fake-indie one. 

Starbucks’ rise was indeed radical. But it won the revolution, which necessarily makes it the Establishment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that (though the chain’s contribution to the spreading monoculture is a little depressing). Beato’s right that Starbucks should keep doing what it does best. But we can’t call it “radical” anymore. 

---

Presented By:
Comcast Business Class

Look at your bill and find out how much your business can save with Comcast Business Class. Internet, Phone & TV for $99. Learn More

Ads by Pheedo

Tags: application, business, Internet, Space

Marion Nestle, unsurprisingly, likes Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative to fight childhood obesity, announced yesterday with great fanfare and lots of media attention.

“This is big news,” Nestle wrote. “I see much to admire here.” The initiative “focuses on kids” and “is sensitive to political realities (it’s called the uncontroversial ‘Let’s Move,’ not the inflammatory ‘Let’s Eat Less’ or ‘Let’s Eat Better’).”

Sure, it’s pathetic that “let’s eat less” and “let’s eat better” could possibly be called controversial, much less “inflammatory.” But the food industry and its compliant lackeys among the commentariat have always made sure that this is the case—in recent years, by yelling “nanny state” whenever the government moves to address behavior-based public health issues. But Nestle’s right—the careful language will help the program avoid all that nonsense.

Well, not all, but most. A quick scan of the usual suspects shows very little in the way of commentary on the issue. Perhaps they were too busy trying to convince us that bad winter weather somehow disproves global warming. There’s also the fact that the food industry isn’t fighting this one; so far, so it hasn’t sent out any talking points.

Still, when your whole life is devoted to opposition for its own sake, you can always come up with something if you choose to make the effort. So Julie Gunlock over at the National Review’s consistently nutty blog The Corner decided that, though she applauds Obama’s parent-centric message, it was wrong for the first lady to bring up her daughter’s improved weight (as both she and the president have done before) in discussing obesity. Also, she wrote, parents, not (oy gevalt) “big brother,” should be the ones to teach children to eat better and exercise.

Think about that again: Obama’s initiative is about childhood obesity, and Gunlock’s argument is that it’s great that the main message is that parents need to get more involved in solving the problem. But it’s somehow wrong for a parent to mention a child’s weight in such a context. Gotcha.

The “big brother” bit has to do with President Obama’s creation of a task force to review all of the government’s anti-obesity initiatives and create a report. We don’t yet know what the task force will recommend, but it’s already being described in Orwellian terms. (We assume the task force won’t be tapping our phones to listen to us making dinner plans. But you never know.) This even though the administration has made it clear that encouraging parental responsibility is central to its campaign. 

Nestle’s blog entry, by the way, also includes a nice set of links to various news accounts and bits of (sane) commentary about the new initiatives.  

---

Presented By:
Comcast Business Class

Look at your bill and find out how much your business can save with Comcast Business Class. Internet, Phone & TV for $99. Learn More

Ads by Pheedo

Tags: application, business, Health, Internet, research, Space

I’m worried this will keep me distracted for hours or even days. But then, it will also be highly useful to me on nearly a daily basis from now on. The USDA has created a “Food Environment Atlas,” which is basically a Google Map that users can manipulate to find out all kinds of things about America’s food system at both macro and micro levels, based on government data that can be mixed and matched with a click or two.

Just for example, you can see a coast-to-coast map depicting where grocery stores are dense and where they are scarce (note: that map might surprise you a bit), or fast-food concentration (above). Or you can see areas where a lot of poor people live and where the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away (food deserts). Or you can click down to the county level and get all the data for that county. There are dozens of data points in addition to those noted above, such as food prices, the number of restaurants, income data, and information on school lunch programs. 

The USDA explains the atlas here. 

---

Presented By:
Comcast Business Class

Look at your bill and find out how much your business can save with Comcast Business Class. Internet, Phone & TV for $99. Learn More

Ads by Pheedo

Tags: application, business, Environment, Google, information, Internet, Space

Microsoft called for an overhaul of the patent system to create a unified global patent office that will promote innovation, encourage competition and drive economic global growth.

“Over 3.5 million patent applications are pending around the world, including over 750,000 in the U.S. Pendency periods [the time during which a patent is "pending"] are extending to three, four or in some cases five years before final patents are issued,” Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft deputy general counsel, said in a blog post Tuesday: Improving Global Patents: Think Locally, Act Globally.

What that means is that obtaining and enforcing a patent for a product sold internationally quickly becomes prohibitively expensive.

“The cost of this workload to patent applicants and patent offices is too high, and the delays in securing patents are too long for entrepreneurs and large enterprises alike,” Gutierrez said in his post on Microsoft’s On the Issues blog.

Read more here.

Related resource:

United States Patent and Trademark Office

Tags: application, blogs, Google, Innovation, Internet, microsoft, US

One of the more thought-provoking CollegeHumor videos was their (exaggerated) attempt to imagine the inner life of an attractive woman. One of the things it makes clear is that being a hot girl means a constant stream of positive feedback: guys turn to smile at you, they laugh loudly at all your jokes, they’re always eager to do favors. The world just seems to bend itself to your desires.

One might think that such a constant stream of positive attention would make you particularly confident and resilient, but the human mind doesn’t work that way; it adapts to its environment. Constant positive attention doesn’t make you less dependent on praise any more than constant eating makes you less dependent on food. When someone comes along and says something mean, you don’t fall back on your years of positive experiences and decide to ignore them. Instead, you’re so shocked by the experience that you come away deeply wounded.

I think I first realized this when I visited a well-known author. He’d written several highly-regarded books which received apparently unanimous praise. If someone’s ever criticized him for something, I’ve never seen it. Yet, when I saw him, he told me he’d been feeling down for nearly a week. Why? Because a reader from Australia sent him a nasty email. The endless praise hadn’t made him more resilient; it had made him unusually vulnerable.

I think this explains why the pick-up artist’s technique of the “neg” — a minor offhand insult intended to dent a girl’s self-esteem — is so particularly effective, especially on unusually attractive women. For people who aren’t used to being insulted, even a minor insult carries a powerful sting. (A major insult would probably be too strong, though. They’d be too hurt to want to even associate with you.)

Another thing made clear in the video is that bidding for a girl’s affections is typically a kind dollar auction. A dollar auction is an auction where both the highest bidder and the second-higest bidder have to pay (even though only the highest bidder gets the prize). Rational behavior in a dollar auction isn’t particularly clear — if you’re the second-highest bidder, it always seems to make sense to bid a little more, since you’ll lose the same amount of money but at least get to take home the prize. But if you keep doing that, you soon find yourself paying ridiculously large amounts for something you might not even get.

With girls, there isn’t a formal auction, but instead guys bid by buying her things, with no promise that they’ll get anything in return. Since the things you’ve already spent so much, it always seems sensible to spend a little more to get the girl. The result, from the girl’s perspective, is that people are falling over themselves to buy you things without you having to give them anything in return.

Perhaps the safest way to win a dollar auction is not to play at all. And, indeed, this was Richard Feynman’s surprising finding with women as well. He takes the advice of the bar’s MC to refuse to buy girls anything until “you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.” (Feynman is taken aback by the suggestion: “Uh… you mean… you don’t… uh… you just ask them?”)

But it works, and no doubt Hot Girl Syndrome is part of the reason why. When everyone is falling all over themselves for you, the only person you have to impress is the one guy who isn’t.

The application to politics is left as an exercise for the reader.

Tags: application, Environment, experiences, money, US