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"Outside the nuclear weapons communities, little notice was paid last week to the announcement that authorization had finally come through to begin dismantling the last of the minivan-size B-53s, the most powerful thermonuclear bombs ever deployed," Pincus writes.
In terms of payload, the B-53 packs a punch. It's 600 times more powerful than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.
The US, at one point during the Cold War, had 300 B-53s in its arsenal.
Soon, they'll be no more.
As a child of the '60s, I recall with fond memories participating in air raid drills during school hours.
The whole elementary school would assemble in the gym and scrunch down under the vast wooden bleachers.
The principal stepped up the air rid drills around the time of Cuban Missle Crisis, which gave us fourth graders a lot of time to discuss what the last four seconds of our young lives would be like after "the bomb" fell on nearby New York City.
Although we were just kids, we thought—we knew—the principal was out of her gourd.
My pal Mookie, street wise and a fountain of knowledge, would always say the same thing. "No one can live through the A-bomb. We'll all melt in seconds."
Of course, he was right. (Mookie was reliably right about everything.)
Just learning that soon there will be no more B-53s gives me a reason to celebrate. How about you?
Note: Beginning today, I'm introducing a regular post called Monday Monday. Readers under age 50 may not all know my title is borrowed from a 1960s pop song. That's their good fortune.)
Many bloggers worry about venomous critics (aka, "trolls").
That holds true as well for anyone who thinks, speaks or acts with a modicum of imagination.
The Tao Te Ching teaches:
"Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity."
Forget the trolls. Forge on.
Nearly 90 percent of B-to-B marketers use content marketing to generate leads and sales, according to a new study by Junta42 and MarketingProfs.
But what separates great B-to-B social media marketers from the mediocre majority?
Three factors, according to the study's findings:
- The most effective marketers spend more. The most effective marketers devote 30 percent of their budgets to content marketing. The least effective marketers devote only 18 percent.
- The most effective marketers segment by buying cycle. The most effective marketers tend to segment their campaigns based on customers' buying cycles. Thirty-seven percent of the most effective marketers segment this way. Only 23 percent of the least effective marketers do.
- The most effective marketers have the CEO's buy-in. Twenty-three percent of the least effective marketers are challenged by the big cheese. Only seven percent of the most effective marketers are.
Ask yourself these questions. How much do you invest in content marketing? How do you segment your outreach effort? And who's "bought into" social media marketing—or not?
Is it your time to take a giant step forward?
"Madman" Marjorie Clayman has a terrific new tutorial on her blog for anyone who's freaked out about learning to use Twitter.
It's easy to follow and practically encylopedic.
I always learn a lot from Marjorie's posts.
But this post rocks.
Check it out. It's well worth your time.
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," Shakespeare wrote. But Billy never needed a Zipcar when he wanted to escape London for the weekend.
Internet entrepreneur Lisa Gansky has written an insightful new book, The Mesh, which reveals the inner workings of scores of bleeding-edge businesses that have in common one key fact: they derive their unique selling proposition from a "share platform."
While the concept of sharing dates from the time of the Cro-Magnons, the Web has made it possible for 21st Century consumers to lease commodities on a grand scale. Everything from artworks to apartments, books to boats, cars to clothing. Even cats and dogs.
Supplanting old-school "buyer/seller/own-it" businesses, Gansky says, "a new model is starting to take root and grow, one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more power to guide those choices. I call this emerging model 'The Mesh'."
Mesh businesses (or what we used to call "rental companies"), Gansky says, are based on "network-enabled sharing—on access rather than ownership."
Sounds like a Commie plot to me.
But it's pure capitalism. Clever Mesh businesses, after perfecting a foundational service, boost their revenues through a blend of partnerships and affinity programs.
Zipcar, for example, offers customers not only car-sharing, but hotel rooms, restaurant reservations, foods, wines, fitness centers, event tickets and access to a host of other goods and services.
The Mesh is eye-opening and provocative. Borrow—don't buy—a copy today.
