A Variety of Information

A big news event took place today as Disney announced the purchase of Pixar. It's huge because it makes Steve Jobs the largest individual shareholder in Disney, putting him on the board of directors and making him about $3.5 Billion. It also means that Pixar might suffer creatively from the Disney mega-empire and that other media conglomerates might be scared away from working with Apple on iTunes content (because Steve Jobs is also the head of Apple). Ironically, John Lasseter, the creative head of Pixar, left Disney years ago so he could work on experimental animation at Industrial Light & Magic, which would become Pixar.

Sorry. Nerd alert. It's amazing what you discover through Slashdot. Like that an independent production company is attempting to produce an on-demand second season of the TV show Firefly. If you think this is a good idea, support them by hitting the website and taking the short survey (no email required). A related sad note: I'm down to the last two episodes of Firefly, and after that I'm done with the series. The hardest thing isn't just seeing it end, but knowing how much each actor and producer believed and fought for the series. If only Nathan Fillion wasn't so cute.

And, there are two things I have vowed to do upon getting a job. The first is join Netflix and rent every season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (collective groans aside). I got really interested after I began reading about the complex, Season spanning storylines, and now I want to experience it all first hand.
The second thing is to give a monthly donation to Save the Children, the second largest children's charity in the world. The reason is that some of their volunteers stopped me on Michigan Ave. the other day and made me explain why I couldn't donate (I don't have a job). I then promised them that when I got a job, I would. I gave them my word, accompanied by a handshake, so I must ablidge.

As far as my Starbucks letter is concerned, it turns out that there is quite a bit of information that I need to uncover before I can effectively write the letter, and all of that information is in a variety of places. For instance:
The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report is found here.
While the Financial Report is found here.
Then the information on the Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) program can be found here.
Then their supplier code of conduct is here.
Another problem is that the 2005 CSR report isn't out and the woman I talked to said she expected it in a month but couldn't be sure.
But I did find some news so far. Unfortunately, it's bad. It turns out that only 1.6% of purchased coffee from 2004 was Fair Trade. I thought this wasn't as bad of a number because of C.A.F.E., Starbucks own system of preferred buying from suppliers who score highest on an economic, social, and environmental scorecard. It turns out that only 14.5% of all coffed purchased was under that system. So very little, 16.1% of Starbucks coffee can be considered fair if the C.A.F.E. system is just at all. This was disheartening. And their charitable giving for the year was only 2.3% of their pre-tax earnings.

Is my blog turning into something more or something less?