VladMolina

A 16 oz container full of potentially harmful beach litter sounds like, well, alot. I am surprised anybody is really willing to do that much work for a free coffee.

How many of your 18 businesses from last year are participating this year?

Matt,

You often point out many examples of how journalists, lawyers, regulators, and politicians fundamentally fail to understand what financial market professionals actually do and how they actually think. What do you think is the root of this lack of understanding? Are finance guys just incomprehensible people? Are they terrible at PR? Do people just have an axe to grind?

How can people (besides you) improve public understanding of financial markets and professionals in those markets?

You might be right.

You seem in favor of collecting the monuments together in a handful of places that are dedicated to discussing the history of the monuments themselves rather than using the monuments primarily as they were originally intended, as a way of framing the narrative of civil war history. I think that most people with opinions on the topic would agree that this would at least be an improvement over the status quo.

Where people on either side would start to balk is how you choose to frame the presentation. Is the history of the monuments themselves really history at this point or is it too close to our present moment for there to be broad agreement that the topic was treated fairly enough? Is there any overlap between the set of presentations that would satisfy those vocally defending the monuments' current placements as well as those vocally calling for them to be stored in the deep dark basement of some government building somewhere? Can you build something that is neither seen as "Museum of Southern Heroes" nor as "Museum of Awful Racists and the Racists who Liked them"? When we are only a few years removed from Georgia having a contentious fight about removing the Confederate Battle Flag from its state flag, aren't you really talking about memorializing something that people cannot really agree is part of our past instead of also part of our present? Is it reasonable to preserve the history of "preserving the history of the Confederacy" when that original effort is still going quite strong?

So are people really doing 30 minutes of work on the beach in exchange for a free cup of coffee (and of course the satisfaction of helping out the community)? Or were most of the cups returned to businesses for rewards last year for bigger rewards? Do you know the average retail price of a reward that was actually collected?

This sounds like a really great idea that could be featured in a book like Freakonomics someday.