Requests for Posts

Here are some topics I would like there to be posts about, and which I will probably never get around to writing about.

So I want to try something different: if you believe you could write a good post about any of these topics, please reply to this email and we will either 1) pay you a small amount of money to write about them for ATVBT, 2) try to set you up to write about them for a bigger outlet, 3) some mysterious third thing.

The Scapa Society

The Scapa Society (Society for Checking (or Controlling) the Abuses in Public Advertising) was an organization founded in Britain in 1893 to protest against the burgeoning advertising business. It has been called "the first organised reaction against advertising" (Wikipedia)

Seems like it might have relevance for modern advertising discussions.

This Chair

I see this particular design of chair everywhere now:

I want an investigation of this metal design that (if memory serves me) was not a big deal 10 years ago, and now is absolutely everywhere: who invented it? Who manufactures it? Why is it winning so thoroughly in the free market of chairs?

(Tangential but relevant: Ethan Zuckerman blogpost from 2011 about a previous chair phenomenon, the white plastic monobloc).

Renting Your Booth At Work

Hairdressers studios often seem to have a setup where the individual hairdressers pay to rent a desk (effectively) at a salon. I'm not really sure how this works in terms of walk-in customers: do they just go on rotation to whichever hairdresser has been unoccupied the longest? Do the hairdressers mostly see regular clients who ask for them by name, or mostly deal with walkins?

There's a similar business model in strip clubs – are there other businesses that work this way? What's the properties of a business that make it use a "you pay us rent to work here" model instead of hiring employees (or contractors)?

IUDs

A large number of women in my life have 1) had IUDs inserted, 2) had some complications either while having the IUD in or while taking it out. I have not personally been present for any of the medical conversations involved, but my understanding is that all these women were told that negative side effects from IUD are incredibly rare. What's going on? Is this just a coincidence? Were IUDs tested on a different demographic than is now using them? Is nobody tracking the negative effects from IUD usage? Something else?