The Point of View Waltz

Back in 1971, Harry Nilsson wrote the concept album called “The Point,” which was later made into an endearing animated special that I recall seeing in elementary school. While much of the material isn’t particularly relevant to business topics (the album and the film are about equality, tolerance, and finding value in people who are different from you – a very enlightened viewpoint by 1971 standards) – I will still pull out the occasional reference, since many of them are timeless. One of the songs on the album was called “The Point of View Waltz” (often shortened to the P.O.V. Waltz), and I always wind up thinking about it when something comes up in the news that depends entirely on how you look at it – as does the call made yesterday for a change in the depreciation rules for private and company jets…

Much like a business, our government has only two ways of improving cash flow: bring in more revenue or eliminate spending. In the case of a national government, revenue is mostly generated through taxes – it’s occasionally possible to raise some money by selling off assets, but unless you can somehow obtain new assets for less than your sale price, this will have limited possibilities. Reducing spending generally means that someone who has been getting government funding won’t be – and in a republic, that someone will most often be whoever has the weakest representation in Congress. Traditionally, Democrats have attempted to fix cash-flow problems by raising taxes (but only on people outside of their core power base) while Republicans have attempted to cut services provided by the government (again, focusing on those services that don’t go to their political base), but both parties have tried to avoid mentioning that they get most of their support from the wealthy and powerful…

In the current case, the President is suggesting that private jets be moved from the five-year depreciation to the 7-year depreciation category – effectively, that the people who own private jet aircraft should have to pay more taxes on them. Doing so would generate an additional $3 billion dollars over the next ten years – which sounds very impressive, especially considering that anyone rich enough to use a private jet in the first place can probably afford the increase in costs. However, when you consider that the President is trying to eliminate $4 trillion worth of Federal deficit, this comes to less than one-tenth of one percent of the total. It’s a good start – $3 billion is enough to do a lot of worth-while things, even in 2011 dollars – but for the Democrats to present this as a major step forward (or a major blow to the greedy rich) is just as disingenuous as the Republicans presenting this as a major hardship being visited upon people who already carry the bulk of the tax burden in this country…

The truth is that none of our national problems are going to be solved by political grandstanding, let alone with stupid accounting tricks, which is all this particular measure actually is. Even if you lined up a dozen more new taxes just as big as this one, you’d only cover about 1% of the deficit, and you’ve already got people from the private jet industry complaining about being “singled out” by the Federal government and how unfair this is. Meanwhile, our national debt is growing and our economy is tanking while our political leaders stand around and posture with tax raises and tax cuts that they know will serve no purpose beyond appealing to their own party’s power base. How you regard the situation, as with how you regard this particular tax initiative, depends mostly on your point of view – but from where I’m sitting, none of this is particularly reassuring…

Defending Your Right to Bigotry

One of the ongoing problems with life in these United States is that while our Constitution guarantees several of our most fundamental human rights – notably free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion – the right to be treated decently, the right to live your life as you see fit and not be constantly called unpleasant names by bigots, and the right to be left the heck alone by evangelicals who call themselves “Christians” are not guaranteed under the Constitution. As a result, an apparently increasing number of people who understand political power, financial power, religious conservatism and fundamental, and advertising – but apparently have no grasp whatsoever of the complex concept of tolerance – keep using their wealth, power, and First Amendment rights to free speech to spew hate about anyone of whom they don’t approve. I wrote about it last December , and I’ve also questioned whether religious speech that confers commercial advantages on the broadcaster should be considered protected on the Main blog , but there’s a situation going on in Florida these days that makes me question if our entire nation hasn’t started Racing to the Bottom…

I picked up the story off of the Wisconsin Gazette website, but you can find it in other places online, too. Basically, the idea is that every year LGBT community organizers pick a day in the spring to be “Gay Day” at Disney World in Orlando, and put out notice over various Internet channels. It’s part of the local Pride Week celebration, which draws an estimated 160,000 people to the Orlando area each year, and brings something on the order of $150 million to the local economy (not counting what the participants spend at Disney World). Unfortunately, this idea creates a full-blown panic in the local conservative “Christian” organizations, who appear to be convinced that seeing gay people and same-sex couples in public will turn children who witness the event gay, and similar brain-dead bigotry. Unfortunately, the event isn’t sponsored by (or even acknowledged by) Disney, which means there’s no one the “Christian” groups can lobby to prevent it. So instead, they’ve decided to hire airplanes to pull giant banners warning people in the area about the event…

Why, exactly, this is being tolerated in the first place is a bit unclear. Certainly, there is a right to free speech involved, but if anyone tried flying giant banners saying “There are Jews at Disney World Today!” or “Warning: Islamic Groups in the Area!” they’d be sued down to their underwear and shut down by the authorities before the first tow plane left the ground. Most of these groups defend behavior like this by claiming that homosexual behavior of any kind is against their religion, but the legal precedents on that are fairly clear: you have a right to practice whatever faith you like, but not to impose it on anyone else. And as I noted last year, if you actually do believe in Christian theology, spending this kind of money to attack people of whom you do not approve when there are millions of hungry people who need food, homeless people who need shelter, and sick people who need medical care – not even in the rest of the world, but just here in the U.S. – is about as anti-Christian as you can possibly get…

In the long run, I’m really not sure what is worse – if these so-called “Christians” believe the hate they are spewing, or if they’re just doing it for political, social or financial gain. The latter is despicable; a perversion not merely of the Christian faith they are aping for their own ends but of the social and religious freedoms of the only nation on Earth that would put up with this nonsense in the first place. But the former means that this is true hate speech – people who not only believe the most preposterous nonsense because of their own fear and hatred, but are willing to attack the rights (and presumably the lives) of innocent people because of that fear and hatred. Either way, it’s truly sad to see a religion dedicated to peace, love, and universal brotherhood becoming the Accelerator in our Race to the Bottom…

Making a Federal Case Out of It

If anyone out there still doubts the truism about power corrupts, there was a report out of Polk County, Florida this week that should lay those uncertainties to rest. According to a story online from The Ledger.com website a Polk County sheriff’s deputy responded to a call from his wife saying that a local Burger King had messed up her order by driving to the restaurant while on duty, interrogating the manager and the drive-through attendant, and demanding to see their identification. Upon realizing that the Burger King in question was actually in the city of Lakeland (and therefore under the local police jurisdiction, not his), the deputy called a friend on the Lakeland PD out to the restaurant and tried to get her to proceed with the investigation. On learning the actual details, the police officer decline to get involved in what was essentially a civil matter, and bowed out. Which would have been the end of it, had the Sheriff’s Office not gotten wind of the story, upon which they suspended the deputy for two days without pay. At his pay grade, the $10 fast-food meal ended up costing him well over $300…

Now, it’s no secret that I have had my own run-ins with the Burger King organization over the years. I found it particularly amazing to have once purchased an order of “sliders” (miniature cheeseburgers) from a nearby Burger King, only to arrive home and discover that the top halves of the buns had been left off of them – a story I promised the company I’m going to keep re-telling until it stops being funny. Accordingly, I have no difficulty imagining some of the things that a Burger King location could do that would make the wife of a peace officer mad enough to call him over to arrest everyone in the place. What remains baffling to me is that anyone who has actually completed the training to become a sheriff’s deputy (let alone a 6-year veteran) would have behaved in the manner described. Even allowing for an absolutely preposterous level of arrogance, entitlement, and belief in his own power and immunity, the deputy in our story had to know that law enforcement officers are public officials, and consequently their actions are generally a matter of public record – and so are their reprimands…

I don’t expect to see too many recurrences of these events; this case is unusual if not actually unique. However, it would seem that there are at least two lessons to be learned here. First, as people in general become more connected and less patient, it’s only a matter of time before somebody who is given the wrong food (or something completely inedible – which happens sometimes) calls in people with guns who will actually use them. Being more careful with the orders won’t prevent this – crazy people with guns are going to do what they’re going to do – but it might keep the occurrences down a little if these mistakes weren’t as common. It might also help to have more security in public-contact businesses, especially those that involve cash purchases…

Second, it might be a good idea for local law enforcement to start cracking down on officers and deputies who would do something like this. Because the days when this sort of bully-boy behavior would be ignored by the public are long gone – and the days in which it was possible to cover up this sort of behavior are on their way out. If business and local government work together, it might be possible to put a lid on the worst of the crazy times in which we find ourselves living. But if they don’t, I can almost guarantee that there will be more incidents just like this one – and that more and more law enforcement agencies will find themselves racing to the bottom…

Fly the Traumatic Skies

On the face of things, the story I saw this week on the website for one of the Seattle news stations looks like just another of airlines being foolish – and I’ve already spoken to you all of my determination not to let this degenerate into the Airlines Follies blog. But once I dug down past the headline, I came to realize that the story has a bit more to it than meets the eye- and it isn’t just the company that is racing to the bottom, because at least part of their concerns are at least partly reasonable…

You can pick up the original story from the King 5 News site if you want to, but the basic scenario is that a woman who has terminal cancer is trying to fly home from Seattle to Korea to spend her few remaining weeks with her family. She and her daughter obtained all of the medical clearances saying she was healthy enough to travel that the airline required, and signed off on all of the forms required to deal with the various legal issues, but the airline still refused to let her board at the last moment, saying that the other passengers would be traumatized if she were to pass away unexpectedly during the flight. Despite being presented with multiple expert opinions that this would not happen, the airline wouldn’t budge and also started making trouble about the refund (saying that processing the refund would take longer than the woman had to live), which prevented her from just taking the money and buying passage on another carrier…

Now, the business with the refund was heartless; it was also illegal, and after this was pointed out to them by the news program, the airline relented and coughed up the money. But while it would be fun to condemn the airline for the passenger trauma concerns in the first place, we can’t – which is to say, given the current state of the U.S. legal system, we can not say with any confidence that someone on that flight wouldn’t have taken the opportunity of having a fellow passenger expire during the trip to sue the airline for vast sums of money for emotional trauma or whatever cockamamie nonsense they (and their lawyers) could dream up. We can suggest that the company should have the courage of their convictions, that they should stand up for their passengers and against frivolous lawsuits, or that if they keep attempting to avoid anything that might conceivably traumatize anyone they will not be able to continue running their business for any length of time – but the fact is, that’s not our call to make…

As I occasionally note on my other blog, Notes on a Business Page , the management of any publicly held company isn’t paid to take on all of the injustice and evil in the world; they are paid to make money for the stockholders who actually own the company. It’s possible that the airline’s stockholders would have approved of taking a gamble to get this customer home, but short of an emergency stockholder’s meeting (for which there also wasn’t time) there is no way for the management team to know that, and if the stockholders have voted against accepting legal risk for such situations in the past, then the management team was just following the directives of the people who actually own the company. We can deplore those policies, and if you care enough about this issue you could purchase stock in the airline and protest at the next stockholder’s meeting, but short of that, we can’t really say that the management team has done anything wrong…

That honor must go to all of the people who have sued over such issues in recent years, and all of the ones who read this story and thought “Payday!” and their attorneys, of course. Because the truth is that those individuals aren’t just racing to the bottom; they’re jetting there at 525 knots on four jet engines…

I Miss the Old Days…

I was saddened to hear that in the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan last week there were apparently cases of people using the occasion for a few cheap laughs. I’ not referring here to the firing of Gilbert Gottfried by AFLAC because of a few insensitive tweets; that has always been Mr. Gottfried’s style of humor, and if the idea bothers them the company shouldn’t have hired him to voice their spokesduck in the first place. No, here I am referring to some roguish jokester who apparently thought it would be funny to tell the parents of a young woman living in Japan that she had been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the disaster…

You can pick up the Associated Press story off of the Toronto Star website if you want to, but the basic idea is that someone posted a message on a Google site set up for the purpose of tracking loved ones who might have been in the affected area, saying that the woman in question had been confirmed dead. It became clear that this was incorrect when the woman managed to get a text message through to her parents using a satellite phone a day or so later, and it became clear that this was a deliberate hoax (not just an informational error) when it was determined that the name signed to the “medical” report was not that of any doctor who had ever worked at the facility where the “death” supposedly occurred, and no one has been able to identify who actually posted that entry in the first place…

Now, I realize that modern-day trolls are not, for the most part, truly descendants of the hacker culture of the last century. I used to run with a group of hackers, back when the Internet was still just a gleam in DARPA’s eye and most computer exchanges were done over telephone lines using 300-baud modems and bulletin-board systems, and I can tell you that not only would we never have considered such a hoax, we wouldn’t have tolerated anyone who did. We might have attempted humor by listing Julius Caesar, Richard M. Nixon, Pope Pius IX or the AFLAC Duck among the departed, or political commentary by making entries for Wisconsin’s Public Employees’ Union or Governor Walker’s career (depending on our party affiliation), but causing somebody’s parents such a moment of heartbreak and grief isn’t just unfunny, it’s also cruel, callous and stupid – and those are just the adjectives I can print…

There was a time when being a hacker meant something; when we aspired to be the knights of the Information Superhighway, defenders of the defenseless, the conscience and the whistle-blowers of a nation (and, one day, the world). We knew it wasn’t really true, of course; just as we knew that the majority of us really were zit-faced nerds playing video games in our parents’ basements who had never had girlfriends. But it was something to believe in; something that made us more than just a bunch of poorly-socialized technology geeks with a penchant for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and vintage Mountain Dew. The interconnection of all of humanity has done some wonderful things for our world, bringing people together and creating friendships and communities where once there was only quiet desperation and loneliness, but it has also given that tiny number of truly monstrous human beings the chance to vent their spleen, hatred and cruelty onto innocent people in a time of crisis…

It makes me sad for my species, sometimes. And if this behavior is ever accepted – indeed, if it is ever greeted with anything less than a murderous rage – then our Race to the Bottom has achieved a new speed record…

The Human Factor

Every once in a while you’ll hear someone talking about how all of the new security we’ve been seeing since 9/11 is just window dressing; not only are the borders still as open and the ports (air and sea) just as vulnerable as ever, but the actual TSA security, which manages to defy multiple Amendments from the Bill of Rights, manners and (frequently) sanity is accomplishing nothing. Now, I’m as security-minded as the next guy, and more patriotic than most; I want to be as sure as possible that no one is going to slip a bomb onto the next airplane I ride on, and I’m perfectly okay with whatever our government decides to do to anyone who does. Nevertheless, you have to wonder if the pessimists are correct when you hear stories like this one from the CBS affiliate station in Boston …

If you don’t want to hit the link, the story is pretty straightforward: TSA agents testing the security procedures in Charlotte managed to get a package onto a Jet Blue flight to Boston by the time-honored method of slipping a $100 bill to the agent at the front counter. Yes, you heard that correctly; for a measly $100 an otherwise sane adult was willing to place a package containing who knows what onto an airliner. I’m not sure if I’m more appalled as a consumer (I expect better from the private sector!) as a reasonably ethical human being (how could ANYONE risk over a hundred human lives in such an idiotic and reckless fashion for mere personal gain?) or as a business teacher (you risked a life sentence for $100? Really? You’re okay with being paid the equivalent of $2 a year for the next fifty years? Assuming they don’t just execute you for being a terrorist or an idiot?) Nor do I find assurances by the TSA or the airline that all packages going aboard are screened for explosives in any way reassuring; the desk agent was willing and able to commit forgery, perjury, and accept a bribe that put over a hundred people in mortal danger – do you expect me to have any faith in his or her adherence to safety protocol?

I should also point out that this is a plot element from a movie that was, unfortunately, released the same week as the 9/11 outrages: two minor criminals are able to get tickets for themselves and a hostage out of the country simply by offering the desk agent several large bills. They’re also carrying an atomic bomb with them in the mistaken belief that it’s really a case full of diamonds, but that’s not point; 9/11 itself proved that you don’t need to get a bomb onto a plane to destroy it – or to kill several thousand people on the ground at the same time. My point here is that as long as the people working for the airlines and TSA remain fallible human beings there will always be some chance of this happening – and if these individuals are underpaid and overworked (or even believe that they are) they will be able to justify such misdeeds in their own mind for long enough to cause another set of catastrophes…

Of course, this time there was a happy ending; this time the mysterious package was just a test article and the sender was an undercover TSA agent. But as long as our entire airline security system is based on everyone who works at every airport doing the right thing regardless of temptation, resentment, or personal feelings, then it’s only a matter of time before this sort of outrage happens for real – and another airline destination joins us on our Race to the Bottom…

You Keep Using That Word…

There’s a famous joke that occurs in the classic movie “The Princess Bride,” where the leader of the bad guys keeps saying the word “Inconceivable!” with regard to their enemies catching up with them, climbing up the cliffs, and so on. Finally, one of his henchmen responds in consternation “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This was essentially my reaction to one of the most recent pronouncements from a pretender to leadership of the Tea Party Movement this past week; I’m just worried about what will happen if more people start making the same malapropos…

You can find the story on TPM here if you want to, but I’ve cross-checked the story on some other sources, and it appears to be correct in the particulars. On Wednesday of this week, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips put out a list of what he called “Liberal Hate Groups” – in other words, groups that he and his followers (assuming he has followers) believe hate them and their values and possibly America into the bargain. It’s a direct reaction to the Southern Poverty Law Center (number 4 on Mr. Phillips’ list) declaring some of the hard-line conservative religious/political groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association onto its list of Hate Groups because of their opposition to same-sex marriage and the abolition of the military “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, along with more basic civil rights. Other groups named in the same fatwa include the NAACP, the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU, and the SEIU, all for the same general sort of refusal to adhere to a conservative Christian Euro-centric cultural view of the U.S. It would be even funnier if it wasn’t so clear that the Tea Party Nation has no idea of what a hate group actually is…

Now, in fairness to everyone, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list includes groups like the KKK, and having a political organization whose goals you agree with end up a list like that would certainly anger most people. But calling them a hate group because they take exception to organized (and well-funded) groups trying to deny millions of people basic civil rights is a little silly, and putting DHS on the list because it supports the current Presidential administration is asinine unless Mr. Phillips actually wants Federal agencies to declare open rebellion against a lawfully-elected government. The ACLU is just as stupid; the only rationale given is that the ACLU hates America (according to the Tea Party, anyway) and is therefore a hate group. By the time you get to the end of the list, it’s clear that whoever came up with this spew has both the intelligence and the manners of a spoiled child. The problem is, they’re also the nominal leadership for a group that numbers somewhere between five and thirty million people – and they don’t appear to be kidding…

It would be nice to end the year on an up note, and maybe sometime in the future I will, but for the moment, I read this sort of thing and a cold wind goes up my back. Because when those in power (any kind of power, I don’t care!) start calling their enemies “un-patriotic” and demanding that they be disenfranchised, imprisoned, or destroyed outright, I recall the lessons of history and what happened the last time a national government was co-opted by such people (reference Germany, 1930 to 1945, if you didn’t catch it), and I worry for the future of this Republic. In five hours or so it’s going to be 2011 – let’s all be careful out there…

Plummeting to the Bottom

I’ve done a number of posts so far about the excesses of junk food – and institutional food in general – and I want to be clear that I’m not going after the industry as such. I believe very strongly in personal responsibility, and thus I feel that if you are eating a nice 2,700 calorie entre and then washing it down with a 990 calorie milkshake and a side of 1,730 calorie waffle fries, that’s your business. Unless you happen to be 7 or more feet tall, work as a professional athlete, have the metabolism of a hyperactive weasel on speed, or all of the above, I believe that you should also accept responsibility for the obesity that will likely result from eating six to eight times the recommended calorie intake each day. But what about the people who have no choice in what they ingest, either because their meals are selected for them, because they have no income to purchase healthy options, or because they’re too young to know what a calorie is in the first place?

A recent study from thee Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, as cited by the U.S. News & World Report website examined kid’s meals from some of our better-known national junk food chains, and come up with some remarkable results. You can read the attached article (or its parent study) if you want to, but let me call your attention to the worst product offering cited: the cheeseburger kid’s meal available at Dairy Queen, with 973 calories. Obviously, no one goes to Dairy Queen to obtain health food, but 973 calories is a reasonably large meal even for me (it’s a third of my recommended daily intake), and I’m 6’2” and 250 pounds – no one’s choice for a small person. It seems a bit much to be giving a pre-teen, let alone a pre-schooler…

If that sounds like an isolated case, consider the Sonic chicken strips kid’s meal, at 708 calories, or a Taco Bell bean burrito meal at 760. In fact, Taco Bell did not offer any kid’s meals that the Yale team was willing to acknowledge as “healthy” for the purposes of the study; most of the other national chains at least had low-fat and low-calorie options that, if not exactly healthy, were at least probably no worse than any other form of lunch. It’s probably also worth noting that the offerings the study criticizes the most are also the ones that actual kids are most likely to eat – certainly, it’s harder to sell kids on macaroni and cheese with apple slices and milk than on a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, especially if you’ve gone to a junk food stand to obtain them…

Now, no one is saying that everything kids eat has to be healthy, or that there’s anything wrong with the occasion junk food meal. In that classic phrase, I’ve been eating the stuff all of my life, and I’m not dead yet. But at the same time I can’t help thinking that 973 calories (and the attendant amounts of fat and sodium) is a lot to put up with in exchange for the relatively small amount of food described. Even as a small child you could probably have talked me into a Happy Meal (at only 385 to 650 calories), and I suspect that modern kids aren’t that different – especially if they get the toy they really wanted in the package. I’m just suggesting that if eating habits are really learned in childhood (and all of the current research suggests they are) it might be possible to start teaching children to get the most from their calories and fats at the same time we start teaching them to get the most for their money and time, and give them the chance to opt out of both the massive health problems associated with obesity and the massive social problems of being a health food snob while there’s still time…

Because if we don’t, the next generation is going to be plummeting to the Bottom right along with us…

Point and Counterpoint

Over the past few years we’ve been hearing an increasing number of stories about atheist groups renting billboards claiming that there is no God and they’re all doing fine without one. A lot of religious people seem to take these as a direct attack against them, or at least against the institutions they belong to, while the atheists themselves see such messages as a counter-attack against all of the religious billboards, radio spots, television commercials, bus benches, movie trailers, and propaganda pamphlets (to call them by their right name) that most major religions spread around. Consequently, neither side seems to understand why the other side is mad at them – the atheists see their ads as nothing more than a demand for equal time (in the sense of publicly proclaiming their beliefs, just the way the religious advertising does), while the religious groups believe that the atheists are trying to destroy them (and in extreme cases, to turn the entire world over to the demonic forces of the Adversary) and everything they hold dear, and must be stopped at all costs. In at least one case, literally…

A story being reported by the Fox affiliate station in Dallas tells about how an anonymous group of “pastors and businessmen” has hired a number of mobile billboard trucks, equipped with Christian advertising messages, to follow the Dallas city busses that carry the atheist billboards around. I don’t know enough about advertising to say for certain if this campaign is likely to be effective; as a strategist, however, I can see at least three problems with the idea. First, the mobile billboard trucks are calling far more attention to the atheist billboards than they would ever have gotten on their own. Second, a lot of people don’t like mobile billboard trucks, religious advertising, or being proselytized in the first place; combining all of these things into a single event seems ill-advised. And third, who on Earth do they expect to influence with such a gesture? Anyone who is likely to convert to their particular brand of Christianity because of a proselytizing billboard has almost certainly already seen one, and the atheists already dislike efforts to convince them of the error of their ways, so directly attacking their advertising seems particularly useless. And that doesn’t even address the fact that this gesture directly contradicts mainstream Christian ethics in the first place…

Consider, for a moment, the huge amount of money that these billboard trucks are costing the consortium every hour they are on the road. Then ask yourself, how many poor people could be fed, clothed, sheltered, healed, medicated or educated with that amount of money? More to the point, perhaps, what is more likely to convince someone that your beliefs have meaning, the fact that you fed them when they were hungry and cared for them when they were sick because your faith demands that you treat all people as your brothers and sisters, or the fact that you hired a large diesel-powered billboard to shout down someone whose beliefs differ from yours?

Some years ago, the great American musician and folk singer Cheryl Wheeler wrote (of evangelical Christians of her acquaintance) “If the Lord is telling you what to do, that’s great. If the Lord is telling you to tell ME what to do, we’re going to have a problem!” To date, this remains the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say on the subject of religion in general and evangelicals in particular. For all you or I know, the Dallas consortium may be absolutely correct in both their beliefs and their interpretation of what their creator wants them to do; it might even be that renting those billboard trucks will get every one of them a free ticket to Heaven and ten free games of skeeball when they arrive. But in terms of civility, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, tolerance, or even the ethical structure of the very religion they claim to be champions of, this is nothing more or less than a diesel-powered entry in our Race to the Bottom…

Come For the Mold, Stay For the Idiocy…

In our ongoing collection of bad customer service decisions, I noted a story that was quoted on the WPXI website and later aggregated by the nice folks over at The Consumerist , about a man who was apparently blacklisted by a Motel 6 after he complained about a moldy shower curtain. If you’re like most people, your immediate reaction was probably “How skuzzy do you have to be to get on a Motel 6 blacklist?” or perhaps “Wait, Motel 6 has a blacklist? WHY?” I read the story and was transported back in time to a similar case in my personal experience – where the local management team got it right, instead…


My wife and I were on vacation and had selected a national hotel chain supposedly a few ranks above Motel 6 because they were offering a good rate and a convenient location. Everything had been reasonably satisfactory until one night when we came back to our room and discovered that the maid service had left us the most disgusting bed sheet either of us had ever seen. What on Earth they were thinking I’ll never know; the thing was stained, torn, and generally looked like the sort of sheet your mother would have thrown out without even making into dusting rags first. My gut reaction was that somebody had probably quit that day and was going out of her way to cause trouble for the management team. My wife’s reaction was that whoever was running the place had completely dropped the ball, and needed to do something about it…


We made a point of being discrete when we showed the hotel manager the sheet; he in turn was appalled, and apologized profusely for the screw-up. It probably helped that we clearly weren’t trying to scam anyone (we didn’t demand cash, a reduced bill, free room service or anything else), but the fellow clearly knew that he had a problem on his hands, and went out of his way to correct it. For the rest of our stay, he personally inspected the room everyday after the maids were done with it, and I recall getting a better rate than we had originally been quoted when we checked out – although I can’t swear to that one; it’s been a few years and my memory is getting worse. All I can tell you is that whatever he did, the lasting impression I have is of someone trying very earnestly to get it right…


Now, you and I weren’t there when the Motel 6 case went down; we don’t know for any certainty whether there was mold, how bad it was, whether the customer was an ass about things, whether the on-site manager was an ass about things, whether any effort was made to satisfy the customer’s demands, whether the customer’s demands were outrageous, or anything else. It’s possible that a business-friendly website would have told a very different side of the story from the one I found on The Consumerist. Still, it’s hard to imagine what possible good could come of leaving mold in a shower, blacklisting a customer for complaining about mold in a shower, or refusing to take that customer’s money when he actually returned to that location. Unless he was noisy, disruptive, abusive, threatening, or actually appeared to be trying to cheat the company (none of which has been alleged by Motel 6), there should have been no reason for a for-profit venture to blacklist him in the first place, let alone backpedal when called on it by the media or consumer-advocate websites…


I’m not saying that Motel 6 is racing toward the bottom any faster than any other national chain; I’m just saying that if you go you might want to bring your own Lysol…

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...

And You Thought Lost Luggage Was Bad…

One could probably suggest that without the Airline industry, this secondary blog would never have made it out of the gate; I first got the idea for Racing to the Bottom when I realized that by the time I’d written an airline rant and posted it something worse would have surfaced on the news, and I’d be starting all over again. Of course, it’s also true that given how low the bar has been set, all the industry would have to do to get me (and probably five to ten million other bloggers) to stop ragging on them would be to just spend a few weeks operating with the same competence demonstrated by your average fast-food stand. This is not one of those weeks, however…

In a story that hit yesterday, MSNBC is reporting that a nine-year-old boy travelling by himself from San Francisco to Ottawa was left stranded at O’Hare International Airport for nearly eight hours because the airline personnel who were supposed to get him onto his connecting flight forgot about him and left him in the daycare center in the terminal. It wasn’t until his plane arrived (late) in Ottawa and his mother realized that he wasn’t on it that anyone realized anything was wrong…

Now, there’s no evidence to support the mother’s contention that her son was intentionally bumped off an overcrowded flight, on the principle that a child isn’t going to complain when adults tell him to do something. It’s actually quite possible that the ramp agent who was supposed to be looking after the boy was diverted to other duties, sent home early, or just didn’t realize that no one else was going to come and pick him up from the daycare center. None of that changes the fact that the child’s parents had already shelled out a hefty “unaccompanied minor” fee, or that the airline had a contractual responsibility (not to mention legal, ethical and moral obligations) to make sure that someone looked after the boy and got him onto the correct airplane. Nevertheless, it does make you wonder just exactly what was going on in O’Hare that would classify as more important than not making the company look like blithering idiots in front of the entire world…

That is, until you realize that the airline in question is United; the same people who managed to lose the luggage of a musician who had already become world-famous for mocking them on You Tube. In this case, they’re just lucky that the boy in our story had a pre-paid cell phone on him, and the presence of mind to call his mother and tell her what had happened; most parents in that situation would have informed the authorities, and since this was an international flight, that would have involved the FBI and their Canadian counterparts. There’s a very real possibility that there would have been arrests, criminal charges, or even an international incident, if the wrong people got their noses out of joint. As it is, the airline is going to considerable limits to avoid being sued – and I’m not convinced that any of them will help…

It’s been said that if you can’t get the little things right, you’ll never get the big ones right. It’s probably not fair to say that a company that can’t get one small customer from one gate to another without losing him for eight hours doesn’t inspire much confidence, but there’s no question that it would suggest a careless, lackadaisical and unprofessional attitude that we can only hope does not extend into the people who operate or maintain the airplanes. Because if that ever happens, United is going to be racing straight into the ground…

In a Nutshell

Sometimes a story comes along that is such a perfect Racing to the Bottom piece that I know I can’t even get 500 words of snarky comments out of it; I can only present its moronic goodness to the Universe (or whatever part of the Universe wanders by my blog from time to time) and let all of my readers (assuming I have readers) bask in the dull-witted glow. This is one of those times: I bring you the story of a large group of people who live in public housing who decided to attack safety and rescue personnel with incendiary devices just for the fun of it…


You can pick up the story from the local news here if you want to, but the basic story is that a mob of people who live at the Oakwood Housing Complex in Alton, Illinois, decided to call in a false alarm to the local Fire Department, and when the firefighters showed up, the people in the crowd started shooting bottle rockets and firing off Roman candles at them. The same miscreants decided to give the same treatment to several Alton police officers who showed up to investigate as well. However, there are currently no suspects, since no one who lives in the complex saw or heard anything, or was within 50 miles of the place on Sunday night. Or, at least, that’s the story they’re all telling the authorities…


Now, I’m not going to sermonize about the lack of trust that has grown up between various at-risk communities and the police in the United States over the past fifty years. The fact is, there have been enough atrocities on both sides of that war to make you wonder if anyone left in this nation has pure intentions, and I don’t have anything approaching the arrogance to assume that I can settle anything with a little humor blog. I do have to wonder about the intelligence of people who do something like this and then complain that emergency services are slow to respond to their complex, or even to their part of town, however…


Several authors, notably including the late Robert A. Heinlein, have argued that once basic courtesy disappears from a society, that civilization is simply and frankly doomed, and there is no way to save it. Heinlein in particular cites several examples, noting that this sort of decay is almost rationalized by the people who are doing it as a matter of “strength” in taking full advantage of their opportunities and not allowing anyone to take advantage of them. I call this to your attention because it takes little imagination to picture the people shooting fireworks at firemen being very pleased with themselves, for taking advantage of “the man” or “the system” to provide them with free entertainment, or justifying their treatment of these underpaid rescue workers by citing some wrong done to their parents, grandparents, or ancestors at some point over the last 150 years…

So far, this is still drawing outrage and Internet ridicule from the so-called “decent people” who object to this sort of hooliganism, but it’s hard to imagine any such events occurring even 50 years ago in this country. Which means it’s just possible that I might be onto something with this whole “Racing to the Bottom” concept…

Negative Energy? Really?

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing a post for Racing to the Bottom is just coming up with a title that doesn’t involve profanity, obscenity, or just asking “Are you putting me on?” over and over again. The point of this blog is to showcase news stories, events and trends in our society that are outrageous or jaw-droppingly stupid or both, and thus a lot of the time I’m just staring at the screen going “No way!” or the equivalent with more cussing. You’d think after three years of writing a business blog, five years of graduate school in business where one of my research interests is institutional failure, and more than 20 years in Corporate America, there would be nothing left in the news that would surprise me that much. The story of a woman from Omaha who was fired because her boss thought her unborn child carried “negative energy” would prove you and me wrong about that, however…


According to the story from the Associated Press an employee of Hearthstone Homes was fired because her boss, the CEO of the company, thought that the child she was carrying was causing harm to the company by giving off negative energy. When a number of psychics, including a chiropractor who the CEO described as an “energy worker” confirmed his suspicious about the fetus, he fired the employee, who had up to that point been his personal assistant. She is, quite logically, proceeding with wrongful termination and discrimination lawsuits, while the company (and her former boss) are being mocked by the local radio stations, television news, various Internet news aggregators, and of course, your friendly neighborhood bloggers…


What struck me about the story was that I honestly can’t decide which would be worse: if the CEO in our story honestly believes this new-age negative energy claptrap, or if he doesn’t. On the one hand, if he does, he’s allowing a preposterous lash-up of superstition, animism and self-help nonsense to interfere with the proper operation of his business, costing the enterprise a huge amount of money (even before the cost of legal fees and possible legal sanctions are applied), in addition to revealing to competitors and customers alike that he runs his company based more on his emotions and insecurities than on any responsible business principles. If, on the other hand, this is simply a ploy to avoid having to pay for having an employee out on maternity leave (and possibly increased insurance premiums for having a dependant child on the firm’s policy), or a mean of ridding himself of an employee who will now have childcare responsibilities that might interfere with her demanding work schedule (e.g., his demands), then he’s a cretin and should be imprisoned as well as sued…


Now, I realize that just because I don’t believe in something, that doesn’t make it wrong. Every American has the constitutional right to believe in whatever he or she wants to believe in; if you want to make decisions based on “intuitive spirituality” and your beliefs about “reincarnation and energy fields” that’s your business. But your rights to believe in and be guided by exotic new-age beliefs do not supersede the rights of other people. And if our society has actually reached the point where we have to use legal proceedings to discourage people from doing so, or from using such beliefs as a cover for eliminating employees who might become expensive and/or inconvenient, then our race to the bottom is starting to pick up speed…