From time to time people who know me will hear me going off about the automated ticket cameras used to enforce red lights, speed limits and so on. I’ve been against these for a number of reasons, not least of which is because I feel they violate our civil right to be confronted by the witnesses against us, and actually getting a ticket from one for something I know (but obviously can’t prove) I didn’t do only reinforced my opinion. In most municipalities, even if you can prove you’re in the right there’s no point in trying; court costs (and lost wages from spending the day in court) will cost you more than just paying the ticket and going to traffic school, and there are venues in the U.S. where the court will not actually hear traffic cases involving the traffic camera – you are on camera doing something, therefore you must be guilty. It’s a slippery slope with some really chilling implications, but most people just ignore it, on the grounds that they’ve never been caught doing anything wrong. All of which is fine, until you get “caught” by a speed camera in a city you’ve never visited driving a car you don’t own…
The Chicago Tribune website has the story of a woman who was sent a ticket for driving her 2005 Nissan 62 miles per hour in a 45 mph work zone in Sangamon County, Il earlier this year – despite the fact that she does not own a 2005 Nissan, has never been to Sangamon County, and looks nothing like the woman in the speed camera image in the first place. If you really care, I can direct you to first-person accounts as well as cases documented in the public record of incidents like this occurring all over the United States and Europe, as well as related information about companies being paid a commission based on the number of tickets issued by the equipment. The real kicker, as far as I’m concerned, is the studies showing that these devices do not lower average driving speeds, increase compliance with the law, or improve road safety; in point of fact, there seems to be good evidence that traffic cameras actually cause accidents…
The only known benefit to these devices is that they generate revenue for the municipality that installed them, as well as for the company that provides and services them. In the story linked above, public records clearly indicated that the woman being fined did not own the car in the picture; a quick glance at the speed camera image and her driver’s license photo would also have confirmed that she wasn’t the driver. Yet despite being confronted with all of these facts (and the relevant legal documents), the County refused to even consider her case unless she made the nine-hour drive to appear in court in person. It wasn’t until the local consumer advocate reporter got involved that the State and County officials finally backed off enough to consider the facts of the case…
I will offer no argument to the fact that my personal feelings about these devices color my view of them, but I don’t believe the facts of this case (or any of the hundreds of similar ones) require any special pleading from me. If we are actually willing to accept the enforcement of criminal laws that extort money from innocent people and threaten them with jail time for things they’ve never done in places they’ve never been, and allow private companies to profit as a result, then somewhere nearby Franz Kafka is laughing his little black heart out – and our Race to the Bottom has become institutionalized…
Monday, October 18, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Words Fail Me
As previously noted, sometimes I read about stories that are so astonishing that beyond the obligatory “Epic Fail!” there just isn’t much to say about them. Acts of stupidity so profound and disgusting, and profoundly disgusting, that it’s hard to come up with my customary 500 words of snarky commentary. One such case occurred yesterday on State Route 101, in Hollywood, California…
You can catch the story on the Orange County Register website if you want, but if you’re not familiar with the Los Angeles freeway system, let me set the scene for you: Highway 101 runs from the San Fernando Valley into Downtown Los Angeles, passing through the Hollywood Hills and through the heart of Hollywood itself. It’s not the most modern roadway you’ve ever seen, and frequently clogs up even before reaching the infamous Four-Level Interchange (one of the most traffic-ridden junctions in North America); even when all lanes are open and there are no accidents or construction sites (which is rarely the case). But it’s still the most direct way to get from the dozens of bedroom communities in the Valley to the commercial district in the heart of the city. Now imagine what would happen if somebody were to deliberately block most of it as a publicity stunt…
This was the case on Tuesday of this week, when a hip-hop band from Orange County decided to block three of the four lanes of the freeway with their touring vehicle and stage an impromptu concert for anyone who might be stuck in the massive traffic jam they had just created. As a native and long-time resident of Los Angeles County, the part of this story that amazes me the most is that they weren’t shot in the resulting mass of road rage. Setting fire to their truck or climbing up and knifing the band members were never serious issues, since that would have meant getting out of your car and exerting physical effort (two things that must never happen on a Los Angeles freeway), but I’ve seen cases where people unleashed deadly force on other motorists for far less cause than this. Of course, in some American cities, the band members would have been assaulted, truck or no truck – and then somebody would have stolen their truck…
I almost put this post on the main blog, since it’s difficult to see this as anything other than a faulty business decision. Any publicity stunt is about business, whether it’s album sales or concert attendance, and it’s not generally advisable to promote your business by means of a stunt that makes hundreds or thousands of people hate you. But in this case there are two subtle points that need to be considered: First, the band is from Orange County, and the traffic disaster they caused is in the neighboring community of Los Angeles, which is widely reviled by OC residents; and Second, hip-hop acts frequently attempt to position themselves as anti-establishment or even counter-culture – in other words, the sort of people who would be expected to “stick it to the Man” by performing a free concert in the middle of a busy freeway…
I’m left wondering if any of the people responsible for this stunt gave any thought to the people they were inconveniencing before they decided to do this. It’s unlikely that anything particularly dramatic happened; that anyone died because they couldn’t reach medical attention in time, or that anyone had their career destroyed because they were unable to get to their job interview on time, or that anyone lost the love of their life because they couldn’t get to the airport of the train station on time, or so on. But the fact remains that any of these things could have happened, and that at the very least these idiots managed to steal several thousand person-hours of time from innocent people who had never done them any harm. Personally, I hope the local authorities throw the book at them, and that a massive class-action lawsuit sues them for all of the lost time…
And if we’ve reached the point where this sort of stunt can even be considered acceptable behavior, then I’d say we’ve also reached the point where we can be racing to the bottom while standing perfectly still…
You can catch the story on the Orange County Register website if you want, but if you’re not familiar with the Los Angeles freeway system, let me set the scene for you: Highway 101 runs from the San Fernando Valley into Downtown Los Angeles, passing through the Hollywood Hills and through the heart of Hollywood itself. It’s not the most modern roadway you’ve ever seen, and frequently clogs up even before reaching the infamous Four-Level Interchange (one of the most traffic-ridden junctions in North America); even when all lanes are open and there are no accidents or construction sites (which is rarely the case). But it’s still the most direct way to get from the dozens of bedroom communities in the Valley to the commercial district in the heart of the city. Now imagine what would happen if somebody were to deliberately block most of it as a publicity stunt…
This was the case on Tuesday of this week, when a hip-hop band from Orange County decided to block three of the four lanes of the freeway with their touring vehicle and stage an impromptu concert for anyone who might be stuck in the massive traffic jam they had just created. As a native and long-time resident of Los Angeles County, the part of this story that amazes me the most is that they weren’t shot in the resulting mass of road rage. Setting fire to their truck or climbing up and knifing the band members were never serious issues, since that would have meant getting out of your car and exerting physical effort (two things that must never happen on a Los Angeles freeway), but I’ve seen cases where people unleashed deadly force on other motorists for far less cause than this. Of course, in some American cities, the band members would have been assaulted, truck or no truck – and then somebody would have stolen their truck…
I almost put this post on the main blog, since it’s difficult to see this as anything other than a faulty business decision. Any publicity stunt is about business, whether it’s album sales or concert attendance, and it’s not generally advisable to promote your business by means of a stunt that makes hundreds or thousands of people hate you. But in this case there are two subtle points that need to be considered: First, the band is from Orange County, and the traffic disaster they caused is in the neighboring community of Los Angeles, which is widely reviled by OC residents; and Second, hip-hop acts frequently attempt to position themselves as anti-establishment or even counter-culture – in other words, the sort of people who would be expected to “stick it to the Man” by performing a free concert in the middle of a busy freeway…
I’m left wondering if any of the people responsible for this stunt gave any thought to the people they were inconveniencing before they decided to do this. It’s unlikely that anything particularly dramatic happened; that anyone died because they couldn’t reach medical attention in time, or that anyone had their career destroyed because they were unable to get to their job interview on time, or that anyone lost the love of their life because they couldn’t get to the airport of the train station on time, or so on. But the fact remains that any of these things could have happened, and that at the very least these idiots managed to steal several thousand person-hours of time from innocent people who had never done them any harm. Personally, I hope the local authorities throw the book at them, and that a massive class-action lawsuit sues them for all of the lost time…
And if we’ve reached the point where this sort of stunt can even be considered acceptable behavior, then I’d say we’ve also reached the point where we can be racing to the bottom while standing perfectly still…
Monday, October 4, 2010
New Food Warnings
For anyone out there who thought the Friendly’s burger using grilled-cheese sandwiches for buns was the worst regular product we were going to see – well, you didn’t really think that was going to last, did you? Now, I’m not counting intentional gross-outs like the 6 pound, 11 pound, 25 pound and 50 pound burgers available at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Pennsylvania (and its occasional competitors); while these are commercially available food offerings, fair and square, they are only available from one rather specialized provider and were created specifically for the purpose of being a challenge to eat, whereas the Friendly’s and Hardees offerings referenced in an earlier post are mass-produced products available in thousands of locations. And then there’s the two new products that have just popped up…
According to several articles like this one in the New York Daily News and this one from the Daily Mail online , there are two new contenders in the ultra-burger market: Burger King’s Pizza Burger, and Carl’s Jr.’s/Hardee’s Foot Long Cheeseburger. The Footlong is really just three smaller cheeseburgers laid out on a foot-long, submarine sandwich bun, and with total calories of only 850 is only a bit worse for you than several other entre cheeseburgers already on the market. It’s the Pizza Burger – which is shaped and sliced to look like a pizza, but is actually just a heavily accessorized burger – with its 2,560 calories that really tips the scale into the absurd. Unless you plan to share this thing with a few of your friends, you’ll be ingesting more calories than the average person needs in a day, and that’s before we add on fries, a milkshake and dessert…
Now, as previously noted, no one is forcing customers to consume this virtual “dinner of doom” at one sitting, and if you share it out it’s really no more dangerous than anything else on the menu. What’s really disturbing about these developments is the way this trend is proliferating across the industry. Time was, unless you wanted to drive out to Denny’s (or whatever your state’s local equivalent might be), the only way to get that many calories on a bun was to purchase several ordinary cheeseburgers and stack them. Now it’s possible to order a single entre with enough calories to feed a large person for a day at any one of several fast-food chains, and the trend is showing no signs of dying down. For now, it takes hours (or days) to prepare an 11-pound or 25-pount burger (the Pub requires advance notice), but what happens once the fast-food giants start applying flash-cooking and mass-production techniques to such products?
I kid, of course, but there really is a serious point behind these rantings. If the concept of eating 2,500 calories (the equivalent of 10 plain beef patties by themselves) for lunch, or even worse, 4,000 calories including side dishes and drinks, becomes commonplace, why would anyone even worry about the 850 calorie foot-long burger? Or, more to the point, perhaps, why would anyone worry about a harmless dish of stuffed meatballs, or a simple deep-fried onion – both of which are almost as bad for you? I myself am not a slender person; I have in fact had a weight control problem since I was 10 years old, and I freely admit I enjoy a nice meal as much as the next person (unless the next person is a Vegan who eats nothing but law clippings and tofu). But if our nation is reaching the point where eating grotesque amounts of food has become not merely commonplace, but routinely possible on every street corner, then we’re not so much racing to the bottom as plummeting straight through the floors…
According to several articles like this one in the New York Daily News and this one from the Daily Mail online , there are two new contenders in the ultra-burger market: Burger King’s Pizza Burger, and Carl’s Jr.’s/Hardee’s Foot Long Cheeseburger. The Footlong is really just three smaller cheeseburgers laid out on a foot-long, submarine sandwich bun, and with total calories of only 850 is only a bit worse for you than several other entre cheeseburgers already on the market. It’s the Pizza Burger – which is shaped and sliced to look like a pizza, but is actually just a heavily accessorized burger – with its 2,560 calories that really tips the scale into the absurd. Unless you plan to share this thing with a few of your friends, you’ll be ingesting more calories than the average person needs in a day, and that’s before we add on fries, a milkshake and dessert…
Now, as previously noted, no one is forcing customers to consume this virtual “dinner of doom” at one sitting, and if you share it out it’s really no more dangerous than anything else on the menu. What’s really disturbing about these developments is the way this trend is proliferating across the industry. Time was, unless you wanted to drive out to Denny’s (or whatever your state’s local equivalent might be), the only way to get that many calories on a bun was to purchase several ordinary cheeseburgers and stack them. Now it’s possible to order a single entre with enough calories to feed a large person for a day at any one of several fast-food chains, and the trend is showing no signs of dying down. For now, it takes hours (or days) to prepare an 11-pound or 25-pount burger (the Pub requires advance notice), but what happens once the fast-food giants start applying flash-cooking and mass-production techniques to such products?
I kid, of course, but there really is a serious point behind these rantings. If the concept of eating 2,500 calories (the equivalent of 10 plain beef patties by themselves) for lunch, or even worse, 4,000 calories including side dishes and drinks, becomes commonplace, why would anyone even worry about the 850 calorie foot-long burger? Or, more to the point, perhaps, why would anyone worry about a harmless dish of stuffed meatballs, or a simple deep-fried onion – both of which are almost as bad for you? I myself am not a slender person; I have in fact had a weight control problem since I was 10 years old, and I freely admit I enjoy a nice meal as much as the next person (unless the next person is a Vegan who eats nothing but law clippings and tofu). But if our nation is reaching the point where eating grotesque amounts of food has become not merely commonplace, but routinely possible on every street corner, then we’re not so much racing to the bottom as plummeting straight through the floors…
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