Love Your Water! Tips for Better (and Tastier) Hydration

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Hate drinking plain water? Me too. But now at lunch and dinner I fill a tall cool glass of water and take a drink between every bite. I end up filling the glass 2-3x per meal. Slows my eating and fills me up faster, so I eat less. Drinking more water and loving it, because combined with food, it all tastes great.

Except, that is, for breakfast. I drink coffee or hot chocolate to start the day.

To whet my whistle between meals, I mix a packet of Meijer Hydration (Meijer’s private-labeled version of Liquid IV) in a 38oz daily hydration-sized water bottle with filtered water and ice. Because other than meals or after a hot outdoor work or workout day, I still hate drinking plain water, and the right drink mix makes it taste great. Along those glasses of straight water at lunch and dinner, I may be better hydrated now than I’ve ever been in my life.

Each packet contains 50 calories along with Vitamins B3-5-6-12 and Vitamin C.

But what about the sodium?

When I posted about this in the Apple Watch Fitness group, someone asked me about drink mix sodium content and blood pressure. Let’s drill down on that.

Each packet of drink mixes like Meijer and Liquid IV contains about 500mg of sodium to help with hydration and electrolyte balance. They say 500mg is only 20-21% of “Recommended Daily Value,” but when it comes to guidelines developed by or with the help of the consumer products industry, I believe we all should, pardon the pun, take them with a grain of salt. Those guidelines are designed with consumer safety in mind, but also, like any other product, to maximize consumption (and thus sales and revenue).

Bottom line: I use a maximum of one packet per day.

Observation: I almost can’t believe these companies recommend “mixing a packet in 16 ounces of water,” because the flavor is plenty strong in the 38oz bottle and when I mixed it in 16 ounces it ran my tastebuds over. Again, though, I think it may be about encouraging overconsumption.

What’s ‘missing’: Artificial sweeteners

For me, the problem with most low sodium drink mixes, and low sodium products in general, is that they almost invariably contain artificial sweeteners I don’t want. The Meijer mixes I’m using, and the ones by Liquid IV I was using before, contain sodium, but what they do not contain are artificial sweeteners. Both brands now also have sugar free mixes that do use artificial sweeteners, most prominently a White Peach flavored mix. Not interested.

Drinks: Got it. But what about eats?

In our house we haven’t eaten meat (or drank soda, except for the occasional ginger ale) since 2016. We eat mostly fruits and vegetables, whole grains, eggs, cheese, and yogurt. I work pomegranate, the seeds or the juice, into my diet most days, because WebMD and other health experts report it is beneficial in several important ways. Same with tomatoes or tomato sauce, to soak up the Lycopene. Started eating “an apple a day” years ago and almost never miss a day. In today’s world, or at least in our modern consumer economies, we are so apple-blessed compared to when I was a kid. In those bygone days our ‘choice’ was most often those Red so-called Delicious apples or, somewhat better, Golden Delicious. I know I wasn’t the only one clamoring for something better, because today we can readily choose from what to me are truly delicious golden-red varieties like Gala, Honey Crisp, and Cosmic Crisp, and I revel in all of them.

Since we don’t eat meat we take a vitamin B12 supplement daily, and right now we’re getting a bit more B12 in the Meijer drink mixes. I’ve never salted or peppered things at the table in my life; either I like the taste of the food or I don’t.

I am living proof that you can be a vegetarian and still be, um, well-fed. I weigh (way) more than I should, and I’m working on that. To share some good news and answer the Q raised in the fitness group, my blood pressure readings with my doctor are consistently 100-110 over 65-70.

On the horizon: TRUE Lemon (and Orange, and Lime)

Life is a journey, and mine may include True Lemon drink mixes someday.

True Lemon contains no sodium and almost no sugar. It does contain Stevia Leaf Extract, which comes from the Stevia plant, so that’s natural, right, but it goes through a lot of processing, so to me it straddles the line between natural and artificial sweetener, and the company has guidelines on limiting use by children. I do like the flavors I see, and the fact that it contains trace amounts of Vitamin C and fruit juice; I love that the company works with two groups helping, as it says, to make the world a better place: Feeding America and Girls on the Run.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV

Nothing in this post is intended as medical advice. Before embarking on any nutrition or fitness program, consult a medical professional.

Unlike many “helpful health posts,” I also am not selling anything. If you want to explore the wonders of drink mixes or anything else you see here, go to Meijer, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Kroger, or wherever you shop. Or don’t.

That said, if anything I’ve shared here helps you, I’m glad.

US Taxpayers and Social Insecurity

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A post is making the rounds on social media about Social Security and Medicare suddenly being called “Federal Benefits.” Apparently not true—it seems they’ve long been referred to as Federal Benefits—and the media have helpfully pointed this out  in articles that come up on search.

BUT HERE’S THE THING: I care less about how the government categorizes these programs, or angry social media posts, and more about the substance of the issue. Let’s dive in.

What’s the rumor

The crux of issue, according to the post and a multitude of reposts, is that:

  • The Federal government, or more to the point, the Social Security Administration (SSA), takes a combined 15.3% out of your pay Social Security & Medicare. (15.3% is the 2025 rate; it has varied over the years)
  • If your earnings averaged $30,000/year for 40 years, you and your employers will have contributed about $180,000.
  • If the government had put that money into a safe investment earning even 1%, at the end of 40 years you’d have $1.3 million to retire on.
  • Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you’d receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month. That’s not far from 3x today’s average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the SSA.

This doesn’t math out for me.

  • I like Perplexity as well as or better than ChatGPT, and when I asked it to calculate $375/month at 1% annual interest compounded monthly, it yielded $221,000 to retire on, not $1.3 million.
  • I thought maybe the posts were counting on 1% monthly interest. That would be an amazing investment, returning 12% per year, and resulting in $4.4 million for retirement, not $1.3 million.
  • But let’s say you get a more realistic annual return in the financial markets of 7%. In that case, this hypothetical $30,000/year earner would have $980,000 to retire on.

That said, while the exact figures may vary, these posts raise valid points that should concern all taxpayers. It is now conventional wisdom, fueled by direct statements on the part of public officials, that Social Security will cease to exist in the near future. Others contend that it’s not quite that bad: the Trust Fund that pays Social Security benefits is now projected to be depleted around 2033. At that point the program would not go away, but it could only pay about 77% of promised benefits from ongoing payroll taxes if conditions do not change or the Federal government fails to act, meaning to raise taxes.

Unconscionable government spending and Al Gore’s “Lockbox”

The sources cited above summarize that the SSA’s impending shortfall is caused by an aging population and changing demographics, and those are almost certainly contributing factors. It also must have been highly challenging when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) worked with Congress to launch Social Security in 1935, and when President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) layered Medicare on top of it in 1965, to accurately forecast how long US residents would be living 50-100 years later; and how much to tax the citizenry to deliver these programs over time. But it is also worth taking a quick trip down Memory Lane to Al Gore’s “Lockbox” proposal in 2000, as memorialized by Darrell Hammond on Saturday Night Live. (Link will open to YouTube, so turn up your sound and enjoy.)

Gore’s plan was to create separate, protected accounts for Social Security and Medicare surpluses to ensure that these funds, by law, could be used only to strengthen those retirement programs and pay down the national debt, NOT to be looted by Congress for things like tax cuts. As alluded to in the social media posts, in the 25 years since Gore made that proposal, US taxpayers have been surprised to discover their money being used for things like paying hipsters to stop smoking, and to create holograms of comedians no longer living. Then in 2025, taxpayers were stunned to learn about the massive amounts of taxpayer money agencies like USAID were generously spending around the globe hoping the public would never find out on their behalf.

How much of this insanity siphoned money out of the SSA Trust Fund? Thanks to the web of intrigue woven into the Federal bureaucracy, we may never know. One thing is certain: These and innumerable other examples of out-of-control government spending—combined with the US National Debt, which at the time of this post now tops $38.5 TRILLION—appear to make it abundantly clear that Al Gore’s Lockbox, or something like it, is needed today more than ever.

A Modest Proposal: Allow citizens to opt out of Social Security

FDR established the Social Security Act, and LBJ, Medicare, to provide economic security and a safety net for vulnerable Americans, especially the elderly, and create a permanent system to prevent future crises by pooling resources. Sound, and arguably noble, reasoning all around. But if the Federal government ever fails to deliver on the promise of these programs, it would not only be one of the greatest abrogations of public trust in history, it might also cause an economic disaster in the US that could ripple around the world. The fact that policymakers around the Beltway are even hinting at the possibility should set off alarm bells.

The calculations above are based on the hypothetical example of a taxpayer earning an average of $30,000 per year throughout their career. The implications of the government defaulting on the broad swath of taxpayers with average career-long incomes far above that are staggering.

So is it time to allow US taxpayers to opt out of paying that 15.3% tax to the SSA? Here are my recommended elements should the nation choose to adopt an SSA Opt-Out plan:

  • All money currently in a taxpayer’s SSA account would remain in place and, by law, untouched. The Federal government would commit to paying out no less than that full amount over the course of the citizen’s life, and that would remain true whether the citizen was in the SSA Opt-Out plan or not.
  • To address an unspoken element of Social Security—the fear that not everyone will take steps to provide for their retirement, even if they have the means to do so—the SSA Opt-Out plan would require taxpayers to provide proof that they are contributing to their own retirement plan each year. If they failed to do so in any year, regardless of the reasons, they would be re-enrolled in Social Security and Medicare taxes beginning January 1 of the following year. Their contributions would begin accumulating on top of the existing money in their account.
  • To ensure a sufficient safety net, the SSA would almost certainly have to set income-based minimum annual retirement savings amounts for taxpayers to maintain SSA Opt-Out eligibility year to year.
  • Since SSA deductions are made on a pretax basis, discontinuing them would also increase taxable income for SSA Opt-Outs, and the Internal Revenue Service would have to make adjustments for those taxpayers to avoid negating the intent of the plan.

See how much you’ve paid into Social Security & Medicare, total, so far

The answer to this brewing crisis seems straightforward: For those who run the country to work together to preserve these vital programs before they hit a wall. And by “those who run the country,” I mean the media and the most popular TikTok influencers. Just kidding! I mean our duly elected representatives in the nation’s capital. The SSA Opt-Out plan could also ease the strain on the system while freeing taxpayers to invest more of their own money as a hedge against possible financial default of these programs.

In the meantime, you don’t have to guess or rely on hypothetical examples to see how much the government has taken from you and your employers for Social Security and Medicare whatever it decides to spend it on. You can download a PDF right now that shows exactly how much you have paid into each of these programs, and your projected monthly payout someday:

  1. Log into your SSA account at https://www.ssa.gov/.
  2. If you don’t have an account, create one today.
  3. It’s easy to find the document called Your Social Security Statement.
  4. Download that PDF, edit the filename to add today’s date, and save it (I’d recommend both on computer and in the cloud) so you know exactly what the figures were the day you saved it.
  5. When we downloaded ours today, the totals were through 2024, not yet 2025, which I suppose is to be expected of our eye-poppingly efficient Federal government just a few days into 2026.

If the Federal government ever tells the nation, “Sorry, we ran out of Social Security and Medicare,” we and of course everyone who has paid into these programs will be looking to recover every penny we contributed. Even at that, we would have lost a fortune in potential growth of principal if we had simply been allowed to invest it on our own.

A Googleplex Powerwalk to Remember

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Saw a post on LinkedIn featuring an image from Google’s massive headquarters campus in Mountain View, California, the Googleplex. It transported me back to my first in-person visit there, and a WordPress post was born.

Years ago I was at what were then our Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan offices in Mountain View, California, recording videos for our clients IBM and Carbonite.

When our last video was a wrap, I took off late-afternoon for a powerwalk. Our team pointed me in the direction of a nearby overpass, and the walk was on.

The overpass led to the Stevens Creek Trail and across miles of countryside I couldn’t believe existed in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That countryside actually comprises a series of tech campuses, neighborhoods, and green spaces.

The first major landmark on my quest was the Shoreline Amphitheatre.

A current map in the area around the Amphitheatre shows a Kite Flying Area…

which explains why on the way to the Amphitheatre I powerwalked past someone flying a kite. It does not explain why they were FLYING A KITE WHILE DRIVING A GO-KART, but why not? What a great way to combine two fun activities. And it’s like that familiar phrase: “Go fly a kite while driving a go-kart!”

I would share the video I shot of the daredevil Kite-Flying Go-Kart Rider, but I guess I need special access or something called JetPack to drop a video into a WordPress post, so the image will have to do. Hit me up on LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to share the video.

Anyway, back to the Amphitheatre. The design inspiration for this cultural center came from legendary music promoter Bill Graham, who designed it to look like the Grateful Dead’s iconic ‘Steal Your Face’ skull logo when viewed from the air. From my vantage point at the intersection of Shoreline Boulevard and Bill Graham Parkway, it looked like this:

Another furlong or so across hill and dale and suddenly the current-at-that-time Google logo emerged on a building across the road in front of me. Minutes later I was at the main entrance to the Googleplex, known to Googlers and Nooglers as Plex. My research indicates this iconic glass structure that appears in so many photos may be Google B41.

Walking into this world-famous view, with Googlers and Nooglers streaming in and out of buildings and scrambling on and off vans and buses around me, felt a bit like a spiritual experience.

Stan the Dinosaur is a full-size bronze replica of the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex who menacingly greets visitors to a courtyard at Plex. (Rex at Plex™?) Google’s headquarters used to belong to Silicon Graphics, which worked on the first Jurassic Park movie. One story says that Silicon Graphics installed Stan at the campus and Google decided to keep him after acquiring the complex. Another says Google simply decided to install a giant skeletal T-Rex at the Plex. The first story sounds more logical to me, but either way, word is that Stan’s presence reminds Googlers to continuously innovate in order to prevent the company from becoming a dinosaur.

Stan somehow managed to elude my photographic eye that day, but I wanted you to see him, so I added this free-to-use image to the post.

I would share the video I shot of colorful picnic tables adjoining some gorgeous waterfall steps later in my journey, but again, the photo will have to do.

As I wound my way back from my Plexiful dream to the hardscrabble streets =:-D of the surrounding area, I passed by Google facilities at 1616 Shoreline Boulevard and 1708 N. Shoreline Boulevard.

Industry insiders will tell you The Valley can be ugly in some ways, but on this day, my corner of The Valley was peaceful and beautiful. And at just under 26,000 steps, or about 13 miles, it was a GREAT fitness day!

Life’s been good to me so far 🎶

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Every time I get on a plane I have thoughts about mortality and eternity. This post shares part of its title with a song by Joe Walsh, and the title sums up how I’m feeling about things as we all go hurtling toward 2026 together.

Except for a two-year happy hiatus in Rifle, Colorado, and summer escapes to Newfound Lake, New Hampshire, much of my childhood through sixth grade was a nightmare. Over the years, though, I’ve had more fun than pretty much any 3-to-5 people I know and some minor rock bands.

Yearbook hallway scene at Grissom High School, Huntsville, Alabama; thank you, Lynn

I’ve anticipated or survived four acquisition-to-downsizings and a chapter 11 filing by my employers to build what so far is an amazing, rewarding career, on track for a decent retirement if I ever do retire someday. All while having had the honor and good fortune to help our children and their loving spouses, in what may be the worst home ownership era for first-time buyers in modern history, buy their first homes.

I revel in the love of my beautiful family, now including a grandson and a grandpup…and our other pups who have left this world…whom collectively are the greatest people and creatures I have ever known. Only our kids post photos of their little loved ones online, so I’m not posting them here, but trust me, they’re beyond adorable.

Glorious Family Disney Trip: Michelle – Chris – Heather – Courtney – Joanne – me / This post’s featured image is from a maybe-even-more-glorious Family Royal Caribbean Cruise


I love what I do today at Cockroach Labs and have done at MongoDB, Gartner, Stratecast, and elsewhere; in our home and on our property; at the gym, in parks, and on walking trails; and at some great winetasting and craft beer venues.


I value dear friends and just met two of them, Doug and Ben, for a festive dinner at Carraba’s, Parkway Place, Huntsville. Shoutout to our son (-in-law, but to us he’s our son) Chris for getting me a killer deal at a really nice Marriott property for that trip.

We have some wonderful neighbors here in roughly the center of the US who have more than made up for the nightmare neighbors we endured in years past on one of the coasts.

I love the world-class sounds I hear in my Edifier headphones and Apple AirPods, from gorgeous, soaring movie soundtracks to high-speed, piledriving,  intense-but-for- the-most-part-not-openly-evil hard rock and metal. Many you’ve heard of and many more you probably haven’t.


As you may see in the image above, I never fall in line with ‘selected top lists’ of anything, starting with music. Can’t buy all the way into the issues and platform of any one political party, so I’m a Registered Independent.

I’ve never smoked, vaped, or used chewing tobacco in my life—with two glaring exceptions. Tried one cigarette on a Fish-and-Game Club overnight school trip in I think 5th grade, and hated it. One Saturday during high school, a bunch of us were playing a pickup game of baseball and one of the guys gave me a big chunk of chewing tobacco to try, “because big leaguers do the chew.” Five minutes later I made a diving circus catch of a long fly ball—and swallowed the whole chaw. Laid on the field for a half-hour before I felt like I could move again.

Hardest drug I’ve ever used is pot, which I never paid for but always seemed to happen upon for free from generous friends at parties in high school and my first year of college at Auburn University. That is, until 3x with different friends in far-flung locations, my respiratory system started shutting down after a few tokes. No more pot for me! Years earlier I had found myself sitting in a car in a darkened parking lot after closing time with some guys at my first job at a pizza place in Huntsville. Some of them were doing tabs of acid (yep, LSD), and one piped up: “It’s your first time, Jeff, so you should probably just do half a tab.” Did NO tabs 😊 and kept drinking my beer.

After decades of quiet-quitting meat by not eating lamb or veal because they’re baby animals, in 2016 Joanne and I, at Heather’s suggestion, went full Vegan. Yet, while Field Roast and Follow-Your-Heart produce delicious vegan cheeses, Violife makes a true-to-life Parmesan block for grating over pasta, and Hellman’s vegan mayo tastes better to us than the eggy original, no one has nailed the art of vegan cheese that works well on pizza. Good pizza is essential eating, and I love omelets and egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwiches. So a few years later we dialed it back to Vegetarian 🌱 and take B12 daily to supplement the meat we’re not eating.

I own arguably the most bada** shirt you’ll find in fine vegetarianwear, featuring the Slayer logotype

Do I love making cocktails? SEE: image below.

My family got me this shirt featuring the logotype from The Godfather

So, back to mortality and eternity. While I guess I might like to live forever, my life has already been blessed-to-spectacular. My stock phrase about whenever my time on Earth comes to an end: “It’ll save me a lot of work next month.” And if the loving animals who have been a part of our lives somehow do not get into Heaven with my family, but are herded away to Pet Heaven, I plan to arrange a Park Hopper Pass with God. That way I can go from where I’m pretty sure I’ll be—a slice of cosmic real estate I call Permanent Purgatory—and travel between People Heaven and Pet Heaven, like on weekends, or on Mondays when park traffic is lighter, so I can visit those I love most for eternity.

You want more, discerning readers, on Permanent Purgatory? Good call. To me, New York Times bestselling author Dave Barry is the greatest humor writer who has ever lived. Dave’s in a band with other writers and authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, and he’s always calling out phrases that might be good band names. So I like to think Dave might say: “Permanent Purgatory would also be a good name for a band.”

Dave posing with one of the myriad of masterpieces he has authored: Best. State. Ever, about his home base of Florida

I’ll now bring this post to a close with some shameless plugs for Dave (which, to be clear, he did not ask for and knows nothing about):

Dave Barry on Substack

DaveBarry.com, which offers many of Dave’s legendary columns and Holiday Gift Guides at The Miami Herald and beyond

Does Your Waste Hauler Actually Recycle Your Plastic “Recycling”? Hard Truths on the High Seas

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If you put out materials for recycling, do you know where they go?

We’ve been recycling for decades, first in California and since 2016 in Indiana. In California, at least where we lived, it was mandatory; we were given three stackable mini-bins to separate plastic/glass/paper and a green waste cart the size of the regular trash cart. In Indiana we pay an extra fee to get our loaded-to-the-gills recycling cart picked up every two weeks, while our nearly-empty trash cart is picked up faithfully every week.

Alert readers may have spotted “high seas” and “gills” and thought: foreshadowing. I invite you to keep paddling. But first, a quick reality check: this is not a climate activism/Green New Deal treatise. To us, recycling is not political. It’s logical, and responsible. It comes from being raised to fix, mend, and reuse things whenever you could instead of, in Mom’s words, “throwing away and buying new.”

In addition to recycling, another thing we’ve done for decades is enjoy and learn from reports by common-sense independent reporter John Stossel. One of his recent videos showed how companies and countries are shipping plastic “recycling” to various parts of the world, creating plastic mountains on land and floating masses of plastic in the world’s oceans, including…

The So-called ‘Great’ Pacific Garbage Patch

This man-made monstrosity is made up of the ugly, drifting remnants of what passes for human civilization today. Per National Geographic, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a murky soup of plastics in the North Pacific Ocean, also known as the Pacific trash vortex.

The Patch actually comprises two sub-patches: the Western Garbage Patch, in Asia-Pacific waters, and the Eastern Garbage Patch off the US West Coast. This bifurcated blight is actually composed of many separate floating islands of plastic and other debris that have loosely coalesced into larger masses.

Accurate 2024 data is hard to come by, but data from 2018 is sickening enough. Researchers from the Ocean Cleanup project calculated, as quoted on Wikipedia, that by 2018 the Patch already covered 620,000 square miles and contained somewhere between 45,000 and 129,000 metric tons of plastic. Years later, by the end of 2024, Ocean Cleanup had removed more than a million pounds of debris from the Patch — which by then was a maddeningly minuscule 0.5% of all that was out there. Some of the plastic in the Patch is 50 years old.

All of this had us ready to start placing our plastic “recycling” in our trash. We figured it was better to force them to deal with it in the US than have it shipped off to strangle fish and birds in the world’s oceans, or pile up in faraway lands.

First we posed some hard questions to our waste management provider. What we learned in a thoughtful, personalized response from Republic Services has us continuing to place plastics in our recycling bin — and trying to connect Republic and Stossel for an interview.

What Republic Services is Doing About Plastics

For material to be recycled, there must be an end market for it: a customer who wants to reuse that material. In the US today, there are robust end markets for PET (plastic #1, such as water or soda bottles), HDPE (plastic #2, such as milk jugs or detergent bottles), and Polypropylene (PP #5, including things like yogurt cups, margarine tubs, and to-go cups). Other plastics, for which there are limited end markets, include flexible plastics like grocery or trash bags, and Styrofoam.

Republic Services operates 75 US recycling facilities that recycled 300 million pounds of plastics in 2024. Republic told us PET, HDPE, and Polypropylene make up more than 90% of the plastics it collects and processes at its recycling facilities. As Republic customers putting these items in our blue cart (which Republic delivery support calls a “toter”), our household plastics are getting recycled, and in North America: Republic does not export plastics overseas.

Next-Level Recycling: Bottle-to-Bottle Circularity

Today many plastics are downcycled into things like carpet, clothing or construction pipe. While this is better than sending materials to a landfill, there are few options for further recycling of these products, so ultimately they become more waste.

It is literally, to borrow an overused political cliche, “kicking the can [or in this case, plastic bottle] down the road.”

To stop recycling from being a one-and-done affair, Republic Services is currently developing a network of plastics recycling facilities it calls Polymer Centers to help ensure bottle-to-bottle circularity: enabling a water bottle to be recycled into another water bottle, a detergent jug to be recycled into a new jug, and so on, to keep the materials within the Circular Economy over the long term. The company began operations at its first Polymer Center in 2023, and as this post goes live it is getting ready to officially open its second one, in Indianapolis, in 2024.

“But Only 9% of Plastics are Recycled. It’s a Losing Battle.”

A frequently cited statistic is the EPA figure that only 9% of plastics are recycled. While this is accurate, it is also misleading, because it refers to all plastic produced, including durable goods like auto dashboards and bumpers, consumer electronics, and medical devices. Those aren’t manufactured to be recycled — at least not through existing, large-scale recycling processes. Republic did not provide insights into what can be done, or what it may be planning, to deal with that other 91%. If I had to bet where a solution will someday be found, though, my money would be on a recycling-forward provider like this one.

Sole-source Recycling (One Cart) is Better. Government Apathy is Not

Other questions we asked were: When are you going to make recycling required in Indiana as it was for us in California? And when are we going to get stackable mini-bins to separate plastic, glass, and paper? The reality is that Republic Services and other waste management companies can’t mandate recycling; they contract with customers to provide the services they choose. Republic noted that Indianapolis is the largest city in the U.S. without regular recycling service, and that city leaders must decide to offer or mandate recycling. We love Indy’s big-city culture, major sports, fine dining, low-hassle airport, and more, without the big-city problems that plague other metropolitan areas, but it is behind the curve on recycling. Living 45 minutes out of Indy, we’re even further off the pace. There is some good news, though: our city now applies a discount to the trash portion of our Republic bill to compensate in a small way for the fact that we choose to pay extra to voluntarily recycle.

CTA: What Are YOUR Waste Hauler and Local Government Doing About Recycling?

What we’ve learned leaves us wondering what other waste management companies and governments in all of the so-called “advanced” nations — those of us who consume the most products and create the vast majority of the world’s plastic waste — are doing about this.

Some of the best pieces of communication leave you with a call to action (CTA). So here is ours: We challenge you, ALL of you, to ask your waste management company and your local government what they are doing about recycling in general, and plastics recycling in particular. That Disastrous Pacific Garbage Patch (my term) isn’t creating itself, and it’s not going to go away on its own. Unless we want our planet to keep going to hell in a Vinylized Plastic Handbasket, we need to push for every bit of household plastics to be recycled, and new processes to pulverize that 91%.

When you find out what companies and leaders are doing, let me know? Send a comment here.

And John, when you have a moment, can you reply to my email? Or call me?

What the NCAA CFP should be

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The inaugural year of the 12-team NCAA College Football Playoff (CFP) in the US has bewildered and enraged fans of the sport and generated comments by broadcasters that often revealed more about their own personal biases and financial connections than their expertise. I’ve commented about the CFP on X, and decided it was time to propose a blueprint for how it might go next year.

I started where I thought the 2024 College Football Playoff Selection Committee was starting, or should have started: the 2024 NCAAF Final Rankings. Rightly or wrongly, conference champions aside, this provides the mythical “top 12 teams who get to compete for the championship” the tournament is supposed to be about. Next, this proposal eliminates what the Committee did this year: awarding four teams home games in the first round, then every other game the rest of the way is a bowl game at a neutral site. A lot of the high-handed and wrongheaded takes about “teams who didn’t deserve to be in the CFP” has been directed at upstarts/challengers who had to take on four traditional college football powerhouses ON THOSE POWERHOUSES’ HOME FIELDS. So Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas, and Ohio State, all at home, beat Indiana, SMU, Clemson, and Tennessee, respectively. Few of the so-called media experts and social media catcallers have had the intellectual honesty to admit that most other powerhouses/football factories — including their favorites who didn’t make the CFP — would have lost those games in football-crazy hostile environments, too, and lost big.

Did #1 seed Oregon get a home game in the second round? No. It got a neutral site bowl game against what many fans now think may be the best team in college football, Ohio State, and lost handily.

On to the proposal, laid out as it would have looked using the NCAAF Final Rankings above. It makes the regular season meaningful by pitting 1 vs 12, 2 vs 11, and so on, and continues that pattern throughout the tournament with remaining high to low seeds.

1st Round would have been:
1 Oregon vs 12 ASU
2 Georgia vs 11 Alabama
3 Texas vs 10 SMU
4 Penn State vs 9 Boise State
5 Notre Dame vs 8 Indiana
6 Ohio State vs 7 Tennessee

Predicted 2nd Round:
2 Georgia vs 12 ASU 
3 Texas vs 6 Ohio State
4 Penn State vs 5 Notre Dame

Predicted 3rd Round: highest remaining seed gets a bye (the only one of the tournament). The other 2 play:
6 Ohio State vs 12 ASU

Predicted Championship Game:
5 Notre Dame vs 6 Ohio State

A final word about first-round home games

Although I’ve heard no explanation from the Committee about why four teams out of 12 got home games in this current CFP, I’m anticipating it might be along the lines of, “There aren’t enough bowl games, we needed to add four home games to make it work.”

Not buying it.

This expanded playoff has been discussed for years (and years, and years) before it finally materialized in 2024. What used to be a select lineup of college bowl games has ballooned over the years into a menagerie of colorfully-sponsored and -monikered bowl events including the Wasabi Fenway Bowl, the StaffDNA Cure Bowl, the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the TransPerfect Music City Bowl, and the Duke’s Mayo Bowl.

DON’T tell me there aren’t enough neutral-field bowl games to host four more. Or, if there truly aren’t: invent four more. Failing that: make EVERY game of the CFP a home game for someone, based on the high-to-low seeding above, and leave the neutral-site bowl games to the many other deserving teams across the nation.

Best way to watch: SKYCAST

ESPN seems to find new ways daily to turn off fans and observers, including me, but when I do watch games on the network, my favorite way is now SkyCast. If ESPN offers SkyCast for a game, it appears on one of the ESPN channels adjacent to the main broadcast. (As does Command Center, a multi-screen enhanced version of the main broadcast.) To reprise my X post, on SkyCast you get the best seats in the house. No ESPN broadcasters shilling for one team and telling you ‘who deserves to be there.’ Just you, the field announcer, and the roar of the crowd.

Bitcoin @ $100K: Is Crypto a Currency, an Investment, or a Scam?

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Featured Image credit: FREEPIK

During the 2024 US Presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump indicated strong support for cryptocurrencies, attended the annual Bitcoin Conference, and even theorized the US might help pay off its national debt with crypto. In the wake of Trump’s election to the Presidency, Bitcoin ($BTC) hit $100,000 per coin (current price here). As always, its sharp rise brought out two competing camps: cheerleaders/profiteers urging investors to “get in now,” and naysayers telling anyone who will listen to keep their (real) money in their pockets because crypto is a scam.

My own take on crypto also offers dual (and dueling) choices. I believe the crypto community can either [1] make Bitcoin or potentially another coin a global standard buyers and sellers can rely on to deliver and hold value in everyday transactions; or [2] continue pushing crypto as an investment vehicle/get-rich-quick scheme. [If you haven’t heard Nikki Glaser’s beyond-hilarious set on the Roast of Tom Brady on Netflix, including the bit of the night about Brady losing millions on crypto, enjoy that killer bit here.]

The first and often only rationale you’ll hear from crypto naysayers is, “It’s not backed by anything.” Reality check: all currencies not backed by a physical element such as gold — like, for example, the world’s currency of record, the USD, since the US took it off the gold standard in 1971 — have value only because people and markets agree they do. So “they’re not backed by anything” is a willfully uninformed reason to cast aspersions at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

What does feel different to me about Bitcoin is that it seems way less about “being a currency” and way more about “I wanna get mega-rich on Bitcoin like the Winkelvoss twins” of Facebook fame/infamy. Having navigated the whole less-than-scrupulous mystery world of “You’d better get a digital wallet to protect your crypto, if not anyone including us can steal your crypto holdings from any crypto exchange, but wait that’s the wrong kind of wallet” makes it indeed feel like a scam. It also appears designed to discourage the critical mass of normal citizens and consumers from using it as, you know, a currency — TO PAY FOR goods and services.

Crypto has served solely as an investment vehicle for us thus far, a tiny fraction of our holdings, and I’m happy to keep it that way. In a recent year Coinbase stopped dealing in Bitcoin Cash (BCH). This was interesting because we never wanted any BCH, and the only reason we held any in our account was that Coinbase had previously converted another coin into BCH. In Coinbase-Manufactured Transaction #2 — where Coinbase made it impossible to move our BCH elsewhere, liquidated it, and converted it to yet something else — it took a sizable percentage of the proceeds from us for “fees.” I have a life to lead and it wasn’t life-changing money, so the documentation and screenshots lie dormant on file, ready for future action.

This kind of unsavory behavior from Coinbase, and similar conduct by Robinhood, firms that are supposedly safe harbors for non-criminal regular investors, make Theory #3, “Crypto is a Scam,” the leader in the clubhouse.

I’m a CMA Top 100 Influencer & Strategist

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So honored! I’m a CMA Top 100 Influencer & Strategist for 2024. Grateful to the amazing customers, partners, and colleagues who make it all possible! Thank you to everyone at Base (formerly Crowdvocate) for making this possible. Base’s mission is to maximize revenue through engagement by taking your customers and teams on a journey for higher retention, lifetime value, and advocacy.

I’m a Finalist for a CustomerX Impact Award!

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Exciting news! 🎉 I’ve been named a CustomerX Impact Award finalist in the Market Trailblazer category, recognizing those making the biggest impact on growth through building world-class programs. I couldn’t be more honored. Thank you to the amazingly innovative customers and partners who make it all possible! 🏆   

Winners will be announced at CustomerX Con in Boston, October 17-18, 2023. That’s the video link above. Learn more, and see our smiling (in my case, talking) faces on the Award page.

A Plan to Stop Mass Shootings and All Violent Crimes Dead in Their Tracks

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I have detailed thoughts supporting each of these, but we live in an era of TL:dr. So to encourage you to read this, and maybe to care and act, here are the key points of the plan:

1) Make the death penalty the law of the land for any violent crime, which I hereby define as child sexual abuse and up, regardless of the age of the assailant. No plea deals.
[Federal law]

2) Eliminate or supersede laws that prevent the state from helping the mentally ill if they or their families “don’t want to be helped.”
[Federal law]

3) Force schools to address the serious bullying that has provably and directly led to a number of these shootings. Schools who ignore issues and do not immediately engage law enforcement face legal action.
[Federal-state-local action]

4) Enact serious gun control including a ban on all semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition — not just AR-15s but any handgun or long gun that shoots many rounds in seconds — and a mandatory federal buyback program to compensate owners for the multitude of these weapons that are already in the field. “Then only criminals will have them”? See #1 above.
[Federal law]

5) Make parents financially and legally responsible if any immediate family member ever commits a violent crime.
[Federal law]

6) Return freedom of voluntary (not mandated) prayer to the schools and all public places.
[Federal law]

7) Return the every-morning Pledge of Allegiance to schools.
[Federal law]

8) Ban assault media. Get serious about banning or seriously limiting violence in all forms of entertainment from gaming to TV to movies to music.
[Federal law]

9) Install metal detectors at the doorways of schools, malls, theaters, and other currently-unprotected public venues.
[Federal-state-local action, public-private partnership]

10) Hire expert marksmen/sharpshooters for all schools, malls, movie theaters, and other currently- unprotected public venues.
[Federal-state-local action, public-private partnership]

11) If anyone breaks into any public or private place, or even without breaking in pulls a weapon on anyone in any public or public place, any citizen and anyone acting on their behalf has the right to injure or kill the threatening party without being prosecuted.
[Federal law]

12) No one who is hurt or killed while they themselves were in the commission of a criminal act as described in #11, nor their families or friends, nor anyone else on their behalf, shall be allowed to bring a lawsuit or negative action of any kind against those who hurt or killed the criminal.
[Federal law]

13) Provide tax breaks and vouchers so every family everywhere is free (and supported) to choose homeschooling or charter schools instead of public schools.
[Federal law]

14) Ban movie or book deals, or any form of compensation that originated from a violent crime, to the criminal and his or her family as far as their family tree goes, any friends or associates, or anyone acting on his or her behalf.
[Federal law]

15) Restrict media mentions of the names of those who perpetrate mass shootings to only once on each media entity’s first mention of the crime.
[Federal law]