In case you don’t know, The Onion is a satirical newspaper, and Yu Wan Mei is a fictional company.

Dame Edna once said something to the effect “if you have to explain satire – don’t bother”, and that was in reference to the controversy over a remark about Americans learning Spanish and Selma Hayek freaking out about it. I guess I’ll only explain why I’m reveling in it all.

We have techniques in Political Science (in fact, it has it’s own discipline) where by comparing two countries (or institutions) you can learn a lot more by than just by examining each one alone. It’s the comparative method and it’s an awesome way to make differences pop. It’s also the root of disingenuous logic too. What The Onion is really pointing out, in completely clear terms, is the impact that corporate news has.

Take, for instance, how my favourite morning show, Today Now! has been impacted. This, to me at least, is a direct reference to what has gone on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — now heavily sponsored by Starbucks.

You also get to really think about the impact that cultural and political  norms have on the news as well.

Take, for instance, the article “Potato-Faced Youngster Lauded for Memorizing Primitive 26-Character Alphabet“. Brilliant!

Enjoy it while it lasts. It looks like Yu Wan Mei might not be making as much money in the United States for its line of fish byproduct products as they first estimated.

The triple bottom line can be summed up as “profit, people, planet”. Basically, accounting for social and environmental impacts as well as the profit motive.

There’s a story about a young graduate student and an old econ prof walking down the street together. The young graduate student, clearly cash starved, spots a dollar on the street and says, “look, a dollar” and goes to reach for it. The prof holds him back, and replies “nonsense, if there really was a dollar there, somebody would have already picked it up by now.”

The point being: sometimes we assume, wrongly, that if an action was profitable and optimal, we would have already figured it out and the market would have already cleared. Again, as a marketing scientist that understands the problems of optimization – that assumption is totally false.

It’s probably very likely that you can’t maximize profit, social and environmental benefits simultaneously with existing technology. What’s required is research and development geared to bring those incentives into alignment. It’s perfectly possible to calculate social and environmental harm and introduce market mechanisms (thereby forming the basis of a tax credit system to guide the invisible hand towards more good). There’s a careful policy way out of this. And, as we’ve seen time and again in Canada (in particular): policy is powerful.

I have much of the profit stuff figured out. It’s the two other components, planet and people, that deserves some mental attention.

Sometimes there’s competitive advantage in Ease. In easyness. In simplicity.

A good example is the difference between Windows and the original command line DOS. Another is between Mac OX and Windows.

Simplicity isn’t easy though.

It’s far easier to pound out a five page brief than it is to write two paragraphs communicating the same thing. It’s hard to get right. But most of the time, you only have two paragraphs.

So you see, simplicity can be incredibly complex.

I’m kind of intoxicated by this relationship between simplicity and complexity.

Whether it’s Elitist or not to point out the disparity, the fact remains that these kinds of media flares have become standard.

Lynn Rosenvall taught me that the world is divided up into large media zones. There’s no conspiracy about them – regions of the world just have different points of view and are dominated by different stories on different days.

Our little neck of the woods up here is dominated by the Michael Jackson story. I don’t know if we’re all the more richer or poorer for it. Would the news be greeted by yawns or passion? After all, there’s no oil buried underneath Honduras…