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Reading Time: 3 minutesEvery Thursday I load up my cat in my bike basket and ride to the farmers market for some fresh produce. I use the afternoon to bake bok choy cookies for my drum circle, needless to say they are a big hit. This particular Thursday, I was riding home, a bike basket full of strange vegetables, when from behind, a diesel dually rolled past. The driver stomped the pedal and immediately engulfed me and my cat in a thick cloud of black smoke. Later my therapist informed me that “Rolling Coal” is what they call it, and diesels are not actually supposed to function like that.    Don’t Blame the Diesel Many people see this type of behavior and assume that diesel engines are extremely dirty and spew black smoke at will. This is not the case, you may only notice the trucks egregiously spewing black smoke, but the majority of diesels on the road are operating properly with barely a puff from the exhaust pipe. In reality, modern diesel fuel is highly refined to make it burn clean, and with

Reading Time: 3 minutesBack in the last century there was a movement in advertising that labeled most products as “New and Improved”. Not many of us back then could tell what was actually new and what was improved. As such, the early-90s included a healthy dose of corporate disdain. Now it wasn’t necessarily boycotts or embargos on products as it was a backlash against the prevailing marketing language we grew up with in the 70s and 80s. Eye-catching graphics and hyperbolic language became a symbol of corporate greed and thus new companies opted for a more streamlined approach to marketing. “New and Improved” became a punchline and kids responded with monochrome designs and a complete abandonment of accepted norms. At this time skateboard culture went from bold graphics and logo saturation to blank decks with no logos at all. White t-shirts and cut-up chinos were the uniform, heck, we even cut the logos off our shoes. The overarching stance being that performance is what matters, not the color of the logo. Unfortunately, we are back to an abundance of logos and with AI

Reading Time: 3 minutesThere was an incident in the office this morning. One of our fellow employees dropped a taquito off the roller grill we had installed in the marketing department. (What can I say, the microwaves are busy at lunch and those rolled hotdogs just make Tuesdays better.) She hit her head on the corner of the desk and dropped to the floor. There is a large military presence in the corporate office, and we have many individuals trained in first aid. The situation was handled quickly and efficiently by professionals. Her condition was assessed; she was given the “all clear” to return to work and an official incident report was filed. Our coworker survived with a little bump on the head and finished her taquito without further incident.   While this may seem like an exaggeration, (okay, to be fair we don’t really have a roller grill, and the incident was entirely made up) a culture of safety means following company policy for reportable incidents. As small as the incident might seem, there are potential lessons to be learned from even

Reading Time: 2 minutes(Monday morning marketing meeting notes) Marketing Ideas: Artisanal Generators? Bespoke Engines? Gourmet Distribution Gear? Field to Table PowerCore? Hot Fresh Generators. Pure Gold. Adjectives like that don’t seem to evoke the same “enchantment” for natural gas generators as they do with sourdough baguettes or bath bombs. A long time ago, most of the products used in the US were either handmade or made locally. With globalization, an unavoidable reality of designing and building complex products like generators is that it is necessary to utilize components manufactured outside of the USA. While we can’t claim our natural gas generators are 100% USA Made. We can claim that much of our generators are made in the USA, meaning there are various components that originate outside of our assembly facilities in Wyoming and Texas. Made in the USA? (But Only Certain Parts) So, what sets Mesa apart from any other generator company? Simple, our generators are built by hand right here. We take a huge pile of parts, some made locally, like our enclosures and some sourced in magical far-off lands (Korea) like