Someone asked me why I hadn't hired any MBAs.  Funny.  After realizing they were serious, I replied with this...

Half of MBAs are worthless.  My problem is that half the time I can't tell which half.

It's easy to show disgust for the obvious bad guy.  The lines are clear and there's little risk that you'll receive flack for voicing your opinion (or voting with your wallet).  The Parsons story is one of these situations.  Killing a free, intelligent and potentially endangered elephant for sport?  Yeah, pretty easy to call that.  What's harder to take a stand against are the gray areas.  Is killing a bred-to-eat cow or pig is okay?  Seems to me that there is some sort of spectrum for these things and killing that elephant is worse than killing a farmed cow.  But the cow still ends up dead.  The reaction from some may be, "People need to eat and it's okay to farm livestock if they are raised/slaughtered in a humane fashion."  That's seems like reasonable logic to me.  However, some percentage of the livestock sold in America isn't raised/slaughtered in a humane fashion.  I'll let others argue over what that actual percentage might be.  The point is that while there are large livestock companies to villainize there is no Bob Parsons-type individual to be singled out in that scenario.  This makes it harder to measure who, when and were the line is being crossed.  In addition, buying meat with more guarantees comes at a price point that many can't stomach.  Nevertheless, the numbers are staggering.

An estimated 95,000 cows were killed in the US today.  According to this article there are over 150 million cattle, bison, sheep, hogs, and goats killed in the US each year.  Almost 9 billion chickens, turkeys, and ducks.  I still eat fish, so I can't point fingers.  I just wish more people would get worked up over the systemic antagonist the way we do with the obvious bad guy.

To those who wax nostalgic about how great music used to be:

1. Keep listening to those old songs.  No one is stopping you.
2. Don't expect people to write new songs about a world they don't live in (i.e. the past).

It looks like FireFTP switches from "Automatic Mode" to "ASCII Mode" after installing the latest Firefox update (v3.6.15).  Check for this if you're uploading images or other binary files and they're not rendering on the web server.  The error you may see in the browsers is, "The image cannot be displayed, because it contains errors."  The fix is just to switch back to auto in the settings (FireFTP > Tools > Downloads/Uploads).

I'm looking for a mic for screencasts.  I don't think the list price is supposed to be the same as the sale price.  Where's the automated rule in their e-commerce engine that stops that from happening?

Better To Rent (in order): New York, Seattle, Kansas City, San Francisco, Memphis, Los Angeles, Fort Worth, Oakland, Portland, Albuquerque

Better To Buy (in order): Miami, Las Vegas, Arlington (Texas), Mesa (Arizona), Phoenix, Jacksonville, Sacramento, San Antonio, Fresno, El Paso

Interactive Version Here: http://trulia.movity.com/rentvsbuy/

Infographic Here (PDF): http://bit.ly/hqacpr

We need to do a better job breaking out the numbers behind the numbers.  It's that second layer where much of the insight can be made.  Stating that the US unemployment rate is 9.4% is almost a worthless stat.  What would be more powerful would be a chart or interactive tool that showed where the highs and lows drove that number based on factors such as: Age, Gender, Location, Ethnicity, Education Level and Profession.  This approach won't work well for cable news, but it would help us more quickly identify the true challenges.  In this simple example it's obvious that education plays a huge factor, but there is still plenty of additional insight to be gained from our data.