Newsletter 1/20/2023: Autopilot on the Highway to Hell
From the Desk of Dennis:
This week I’m shining a spotlight on a Loon Call client who has an amazing offer for flora enthusiasts in the Philadelphia area.
Terra Luna Herbals is a Kensington-based garden offering local herbs and flowers for custom order alongside a swath of wellness-centric goods on their website. I’ve worked with the owner, Elise Hanks, since the Fall on tuning up the site’s SEO and preparing the rollout for a huge new product offering that I’m excited to share.
In 2023, they’re taking the business to the next level with the introduction of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription program, which allows members to pick up a curated selection of seasonal flowers, herbs, and goods twice a month. There’s five locations for pick-up at local businesses across the city, so you really get the opportunity to support Philly small biz by joining up.
Pick-up begins in March for the Spring share, but I recommend signing up ASAP if you are interested because spots are limited.
Learn more about the CSA program by Terra Luna here.
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
StreamHatchet, “TOP FINANCE/CRYPTO BRANDS ON TWITCH”
“Twitch can be a great place to understand the general consensus and divide over trending topics in the younger generation. Twitch viewers are generally 18-34 years old, and are fans of gaming, tech, and other similar niches. Understanding your brand’s popularity and sentiment among this demographic is powerful in developing a marketing strategy.”
You’re spending money on Twitch but you aren’t doing sentiment analysis when the killer app is the livechat feature? Catch up, bro, I’m putting you on.
Wired, “Life as a 21st Century Trucker”
“Then there are the cameras. Ascending the cabin of one semi, I see a black gadget affixed to the windshield like an old-school GPS, its lens trained on the driver’s seat. Such cameras protect companies from liability in the event of an accident—they can prove that a driver wasn’t acting irresponsibly and thus isn’t at fault—but truckers deplore them. “Some drivers,” LeRette says, “tell me they’ve got cameras pointed back in the sleeper.”
The blessing of living in 2023 as a millenial nerd is that I get to see all the cyberpunk dystopian fears coming true. Cameras aren’t super-high tech, but small, cheap ones that can transmit from the road are. As we put more and more burden on our national logistics with the rise of eComm and potentially a shift away from overseas production, it’s important to be aware of the human costs and to not malign or stereotype the laborers in the all-too-crucial trucking industry.
Defector, “How Not To Interrogate The Ethics Of Tesla’s Busted Autopilot Technology”
“No more potent symbol of the league’s ambition existed than the plans for a Philadelphia Fusion stadium: a $50 million, 65,000-square-foot, 3,500-seat arena, projected to turn Philadelphia into an ‘esports town.’”
The original NYT story is still absolutely worth a read to get inside the mind of the self-appointed martyrs who are willing to lay themselves down on the path of technological progress and get run over by a self-driven Tesla - sure this is mostly metaphor, but one of these guys got in a wreck and then proceeded to buy two more AI-powered death traps. Burnenko’s piece in Defector artfully dissects the media conversation around self-driven cars to point out how frustratingly scant the oversight is on a company that’s adopted our public roadways as its R&D lab, with fatal costs.
