Friday Funtime
Kickin' in the front seat, Sittin' in the back seat
This is, as always, a random collection of stuff on my mind which didn’t warrant a full post.
Amazon just announced that it’s getting rid of Amazon Smile. For those who don’t know, Smile is a way to donate to a good cause like Make-a-Wish and other deserving organizations while just making your regular shopping at the behemoth shopping site. Charitably, one would say Amazon announced this program at first in order to help drive more charitable donations around the world. Skeptics would argue that it was a way to drive traffic away from other referral sites who got a larger cut of each purchase. Regardless, it did good and I always enjoyed seeing the reports of how much the charity we’d chosen had gotten that quarter, year, etc. Amazon says they are closing it down because it was spread too thin to make a real impact. Perhaps - from their lens. My guess is that they don’t want to spend that money anymore - as referral sites have also slowly dried up. This move coincided with Amazon laying off 18,000 workers, and it’s hard for me to believe these aren’t correlated.
I’m sure Amazon will continue to do things like they say - like work on housing access, education, etc. (All of those directly help Amazon per their own email, of course.) So, if you want to still help someone, please donate directly to those charities. And if you’re gonna shop on Amazon, use THIS referral link instead and help some Candy Gurus.
I took my first business travel trip in literally years this week, and of course got walloped with bad luck. Getting stranded in Houston after missing a connecting flight by what could not have been more than ten minutes is … frustrating. What’s even more maddening is that my first flight pulled out of the gate on time, then came back and spent over 90 minutes (my entire layover) deciding that the problem was not really a big deal, but they needed to file paperwork over it. Look, I get it - but shouldn’t there be a faster way of doing that? The amount of hotels and dinners United had to pay for that night (as I was far from the only one stranded), not to mention the distaste everyone had for the experience, can’t be good. What’s more, why was I connecting at all? Because there’s ONE airline that flies direct from SFO to Charlotte, once per day. Can we please get back to a place where we have OPTIONS to fly? Thanks.
In the “you can’t make this up” category, we have the Twitter account useGolfFACTS - an account that almost everyone understands is run by LIV golfer Patrick Reed and/or his wife Justine Reed - celebrating Denzel Washington ripping the media for “fake news.”
Denzel Washington Blasts the Media on Dishonesty and 'Fake News' youtu.be/bwnNrr9RO2Y via @YouTube …What a responsibility you all have…to tell the truth, not just to be First, but to Tell The Truth. “Just Say it. Sell it.”
I’m a bit over my skis here, but I’m like 105% sure that Denzel and the Reeds don’t think of the same news organizations when they think of Fake News, nor do they vote the same way, nor do they view … anything? the same way. Hope that Chardonnay went down well, Justine.