Random Thoughts IV

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Oh boy, that whitewater park nonsense with it's economic boom pie-in-the-sky-everyone-get-rich projections. :sad:

I was project manager for the federal study of the whitewater party in downtown Minneapolis. I did a reassess of the pie in the sky locally sponsored study that had insane projections of use. I contracted a realistic assessment of potential visitations and operating costs as part of the redesign. I scoped them to give me something realistic and defensible, not more marketing BS like you get from developers trying to sell something. It did show that after you built it that it could be financially self-sustaining from an operations and maintenance perspective with a vendor and admission fees. You would never recoup the design/construct cost but you could operate at a break even annually after that. Of course this was a much bigger project than any of those little Iowa ones but the proponents used the same total fabrications of potential use, just exaggerated even more based on the population within xxx miles.

These little local projects like Manchester and Chuck City may end up being a nice little local amenity but I find the use projection to be just a big fraud to justify building them. Oops, the old recreation planner in me just made an appearance on CF! Oh, and is it possible to say whitewater park without using the term "world class!"?

/endrantonmarketingBS

Haha. I heard their projection of each visitor spending like $80 or something. My first thought was "that's a lot of Burger King or DQ."
 
Oh boy, that whitewater park nonsense with it's economic boom pie-in-the-sky-everyone-get-rich projections. :sad:

I was project manager for the federal study of the whitewater party in downtown Minneapolis. I did a reassess of the pie in the sky locally sponsored study that had insane projections of use. I contracted a realistic assessment of potential visitations and operating costs as part of the redesign. I scoped them to give me something realistic and defensible, not more marketing BS like you get from developers trying to sell something. It did show that after you built it that it could be financially self-sustaining from an operations and maintenance perspective with a vendor and admission fees. You would never recoup the design/construct cost but you could operate at a break even annually after that. Of course this was a much bigger project than any of those little Iowa ones but the proponents used the same total fabrications of potential use, just exaggerated even more based on the population within xxx miles.

These little local projects like Manchester and Chuck City may end up being a nice little local amenity but I find the use projection to be just a big fraud to justify building them. Oops, the old recreation planner in me just made an appearance on CF! Oh, and is it possible to say whitewater park without using the term "world class!"?

/endrantonmarketingBS
Never end this rant! Ever!

Last night we drove through Culver's to get ice cream to celebrate the end of the regular season for my son's baseball team. He saw an ad for a salad and mentioned that fast food salad is a weird idea and that he believed it was probably fake lettuce that came from the weeds they had growing behind the building.

Next, he brought up a commercial that he saw for a strawberry salad from Wendy's and wondered why the cut side of the strawberries was yellow in the commercial.

After that he remembered watching a Brain Games episode where they showed the mind tricks that the advertisers play on you during commercials. From this he was able to deduce that these "yellow" strawberries were more than likely meant to subconsciously affect your thinking.

In summary, my 12 year old son is way more smarter than his dad.
 
Well Canada, you are losing all of my goodwill for housing my a-hole in-laws far far away by sending this smoke and giving me an asthma attack.:mad:
 
This week is making me consider buying a flask for work.

...a really big one

gianhipflsk_alt7.jpg
 
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