Hate the Malfunction, Not the Robot

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…

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…

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…

Fear and Loathing

There’s a recurring question, raised by the late Robert Heinlein among others, that asks why people seem to be willing to legislate against things they don’t like – that is, why do people assume that anything they personally don’t like, don’t appreciate, fear or find disgusting must be against the law, or must be made illegal if it isn’t already? Heinlein argued that anything you enjoy that does not unnecessarily harm another human being can not be considered “wrong” or “evil” in an ethical sense (harming yourself isn’t evil – it’s just stupid); he also contended that attempting to impose legal restrictions on things simply because you do not approve of them IS evil. I would like to point out that in America, such legislation is frequently unconstitutional – and in the 21st Century, it’s generally also expensive…


Consider the case of Manassas, Virginia, which is attempting to legislate all “sexually-oriented businesses” out of their city limits. You can find the story here if you want to, but the basic issue is that there’s an “adult boutique” opening in the Old Town section of Manassas, and the local residents are up in arms about this business generating an entire red-light district, attracting perverts, corrupting innocent children, and all of the assorted uproar this sort of business always seems to touch off according to conservative commentators. Whether these fears have any grounding in reality is, as always, a matter of opinion, but in this case the cost of hiring an independent legal counsel to review the situation and the proposed ordinances is going to cost the town an estimated $71,000 – not counting potential lost revenue from sales taxes, business permits, and other effects of having a successful business operating nearby...


Now, no one is saying that local governments shouldn’t be able to legislate against business operations that will work against the needs of their community; that’s one of the things a local government is created to do in the first place. If the city council wants to pass an ordinance to keep a big-box retailer out of their 19th Century downtown area (I’m looking at you, Wal-Mart) or prevent a large pesticide factory from opening next door to the local grammar school, they should have the right to do that. But by the same token, it’s hard to imagine that a single retail store operated by a mother-daughter team will turn a small town in Virginia into another Las Vegas, and there’s no conclusive evidence that anything this store is going to sell would actually do anyone any harm in the first place. More to the point, if the good people of Manassas want to purchase questionable videos, explicit pictures or “marital aids” they can get them sent discretely from thousands (if not millions) of Internet sites anytime they want to. Thus, it’s hard to imagine what benefit this ordinance will do anyone except for those who regard anything to do with sex with fear, disgust, or loathing…


It seems ironic that in a time when people are living in fear of terrorists from extremist groups that oppose free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and gender equality, those same people would attempt to outlaw the construction of religious institutions, limit the publication of print and video media, and browbeat women into returning to a subservient role that has been inappropriate for centuries (assuming it was ever appropriate in the first place). As with the “defense of marriage” hysteria of the past few years, I have to say that if your moral fiber (or the alleged purity of your children) can be threatened by a small boutique opening downtown, then you need professional help, not legislation banning certain types of businesses. And if this sort of puritanical nonsense becomes commonplace in America, we will have hit the Bottom – and started to dig…

Lower Than Usual

Between the main blog and this newer space we’ve seen a lot of bad behavior over the past few years; the sort of knavery, chicanery and douchebaggery that would make you lose your faith in humanity if you still had any, as well as the sort of credulous idiocy that borders on arrogance (the “Oh, that sort of scam could never happen to ME!” kind of thing). Needless to say, they go together – there’s very little a scam artist likes better than people who (for whatever reason) believe themselves immune to a particular scam. But I personally can’t think of any class of people more subject to this type of self-delusion than the senior management groups of non-profit organizations, or any type of low-life more scummy than the ones who intentionally prey upon such groups. Unfortunately, I’ve just run across a story that illustrates both points all too well…


Some of you will remember that I spent a number of years doing consulting work with non-profit organizations, and a common trait of managers within that industry is that most of them are motivated more by their dedication to the cause they serve than by money, professionalism, or even satisfaction at a job well done. While this may be seen as praiseworthy, or even noble, it does give rise to a certain misplaced confidence in the importance of what they are doing – or, perhaps, that everyone else in our society is just as invested in the cause as they are. Thus, such people earnestly believe that no one would consider suing them for unpaid bills, arresting them for misappropriation of funds, or running a scam on them because what they are doing is all “for the greater good…”


Leaving aside for a moment that this is an end-means argument, and thus inherently ethically weak, this belief ignores the fact that people who are willing to steal from ordinary people without regard for relationships damaged, dreams crushed, or lives destroyed are not going to care if their actions will also have a larger negative effect on our society. A good case in point came up in an NPR story this week, which details an ongoing scam preying on non-profit groups. You can find the original story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that this company offered to produce a professional documentary about the targeted non-profits, generally using stock footage of some well-known newsreader as bait. The scammers claimed that the documentary would air on PBS stations, resulting in nation-wide public awareness of the agency and its mission, and leading to vast increases in street credibility, celebrity and philanthropic attention, and ultimately increased fund raising…


It would be tedious to enumerate all of the things about this dubious piece of business that should raise red flags in the mind of any reasonably sane person, but the one that stands out (at least to me) is the fact that these scammers are promising a host of benefits, but not actually guaranteeing anything. The fact that there are no such programs on PBS (and never have been) and that there are no references they can offer you could be explained away as factors of the firm just starting up – although we should question if any business, let alone a small non-profit group, should be throwing large sums of money at an untried new company with no evidence the investment will be worth anything – but in almost any other business enterprise, most people are savvy enough to realize that you get what you pay for, an offer that appears to be too good to be true usually ISN’T true, and even a signed contract won’t keep you from being cheated, let alone scammed outright…


So here we have the case of people who prey upon non-profit executives because they know such people are frequently unsophisticated (if not openly credulous or foolish) in a business sense, and people who foolishly squander charitable donations and philanthropic support which may be the only hope their constituent populations have because they can’t be bothered to learn how businesses actually work, hire a competent lawyer, check out suspicious offers with their state and local authorities, or even look up such offers on line. It’s very rare to encounter a crime where both the criminal and the victim are racing to the bottom, and taking our entire society along for the ride – but I think this story qualifies…

We apologize for the Inconvenience

I try not to rail against Political Correctness on these blogs – and in person – because it’s one of those topics that are easier to be smug about when you’re a male of European ancestry than it is for anyone else. As such, there are going to be things that I believe are cases of people being too sensitive – or too willing to jump on the PC bandwagon in order to get what they want – that are deadly serious to the people doing the jumping, and it’s really not my place to be telling them so. That said, I still think that the business of a newspaper having to print a public apology to readers for mentioning the end of Ramadan on the anniversary of 9/11 is a Race to the Bottom…

If your local news aggregation cite missed it, you can view the apology here, and the online version of the original article here. Basically, this was a weekend “slow news day” piece about the local observances of the end of Ramadan; something which should not be indicative of anything beyond a small local newspaper not having the budget to do anything really impressive to fill space in the front section over the weekend. But since last Saturday was the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – and since there was no corresponding story about the evil people who claim to be part of the same religion causing those attacks – apparently a whole bunch of people started calling, writing and flaming the paper in protest…

I can’t really fault the paper for taking this position; it’s a business operating in a relatively small town, and it can’t really afford to risk alienating people who buy papers or ad space in papers in the community it serves. Printing an editorial that says, in effect, “we’re sorry if we said anything that offended you” is not much of an issue in itself. What seems unfortunate (at the very least) is that a harmless piece of low-intensity writing (you can’t really call it reporting) would cause such an outcry in the first place. There have been Muslims living in the United States for well over a century now, and for the most part, no one paid any attention to them, any more than they did to the Buddhists, Hindus, or Zoroastrians, until the wave of militant fundamentalism that had been building in Central Asia resulted in the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even then, Americans in general would probably have ignored the whole thing if not for the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the World Trade Center bombing in the 1990s, and the outrages of September 11th, 2001…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t still be furious about the attacks on American soil, or outraged at the deaths of over 3,000 innocent people who died on that day nine years ago. And it should probably be acknowledged that actions like publically calling for the execution (or outright murder) of cartoonists for exercising their civil rights is not a good way to get people to respect your right to exercise your own. But even if we do not wish to consider that some of those who died on 9/11/01 (on the ground and in the airplanes) were Muslims themselves, or that members of that faith have lived among us in peace for their and our entire lives, or even that a bunch of cave-dwelling idiots half a world away do not speak for the American Islamic community any more than a local nutcase preacher in Florida with fewer than 50 followers speaks for everyone else in the U.S., it’s still hard to imagine what would be wrong with a simple newspaper article about local residents, neighbors and taxpayers all, celebrating a holiday…

Folks, what made this country the greatest one in the world wasn’t some mindless devotion to a political ideal that no one should ever be offended by anything, any more than it was a fanatical adherence to any particular religion or a determination to only have people who look, act, sound and behave “like us” living here. What made us great was the willingness to take all of the best things that all of our thousands of immigrant groups brought from all over the world and combine them into something stronger and more powerful than any one people or nation could ever be. The “melting pot” we all learned about in civics class isn’t kettle, it’s a forge – and the alloy that has come out of it is why all Americans believe, without a trace of irony, that we really are the shining example for the rest of the world, and the hope for humanity’s future. “From Many, One” isn’t just a fancy slogan to print on money; it’s who we are and it’s how we came to be this way…

And if we’ve lost sight of that; if we have reached a time when it’s more important to shout angry slogans about the “other” and rage against innocent people for having the temerity to celebrate a holiday that was already a part of their culture a thousand years before we were even a sovereign nation, then it’s our entire society that is racing to the Bottom – and we’re not going to enjoy the ride…

It Gets Worse...

One of the early posts on this blog was about the new Friendly's mega-calorie entrees, and why these products, though certainly not the worst things that could possibly happen to your body, are nevertheless not something you should indulge in without either an unusually active metabolism or a latent death wish. Still and all, they're really no worse for you than eating two entree cheeseburgers, to take the obvious example, and certainly many people do this everyday with no immediate ill effects. The fact is, that if you are eating your lunch in any venue where you can place your order by yelling into an intercom system and then picking up your food without getting out of your car, you probably weren't expecting health food (or even healthy food) in the first place. When the items in question appear on a sit-down restaurant's menu, and especially one advertising good (if not particularly healthy) food, that's another matter...

Consider, if you will, the case of the Applebee’s Provolone-Stuffed Meatballs with Fettuccine, as profiled on the newest article from Yahoo, Men's Health, and the authors of "Eat This, Not That." There's no denying that these little nuggets of death are tasty; they're large meatballs stuffed with cheese and served on a bed of noodles soaked in butter, cream and more cheese. Unfortunately, they've got even more calories and fat than the Friendly's offering mentioned in my original post, and nearly twice the sodium. It's an entree that makes most fast-food cheeseburgers look positively healthy in comparison, and is actually worse for you than a product consisting of a hamburger patty stuck between two grilled-cheese sandwiches. But what makes this really amazing is that Applebee's has been positioning itself as a mid-price family restaurant, or bar and grill, depending on which store and which neighborhood we're talking about, whereas Friendly's (and most fast-food operations) have never made any pretense at being anything other than junk...

Now, this is not to suggest that all fine-dining restaurant serve only food which is actually good for you; or event that such venues would be able to stay in business if they did. Most such establishments, unless they are specialized health-food or vegetarian operations, are going to have steaks, cream-based sauces, lavish desserts, and elaborate alcoholic options available, all of which are (cumulatively) worse for your health than a simple stuffed-meatball dish. Nor do I intend to suggest that we should all live out our lives eating nothing but broiled fish and steamed vegetables; I personally like a nice "meatball 'o death" from time to time, and if you're healthy enough to eat this kind of food and survive, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't. I am suggesting that any company which is attempting to base its brand around a moderate to upscale position with a focus on good food and healthy eating while actually offering products more harmful to the customer's health than anything you'd find in a junk food stand is, if not actually racing to the bottom, at least sauntering that direction at an reasonable clip...