FREE WHITEWATER

Poll

Friday Poll: The Breakfast Burrito Incident

by  • 


A Michigan woman claims that she suffered “constant pain, discomfort, disability, emotional distress, mental anguish…” after eating a McDonald’s breakfast burrito. She contends that a foreign object in the burrito caused her injuries (although her lawsuit reportedly does not identify that object):

Susan Delph is claiming she suffered “severe injuries” after biting into a McDonald’s breakfast burrito, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the Washtenaw County Trial Court.

Delph went to the McDonald’s located 1535 S. Main Street in Chelsea on Feb. 26, 2012, and ordered a breakfast burrito.

“(She) bit down on a hard, foreign object causing severe injury to her mouth and jaw,” the lawsuit says.

The suit does not specify what the object was.

Delph is being represented by personal injury attorney Neil A. David, based in Farmington Hills. He did not return a phone call left Friday.

The lawsuit lists counts of negligence, breach of warranty and violation of consumer and food laws….

Although we cannot know the circumstances with certainty, how about a guess from experience for an unscientific poll: do you think her injury was probably (1) from a foreign object, or (2) simply from eating a McDonald’s burrito in the first place?

Let’s assume that she was injured. I’ll suggest that those consuming McDonald’s breakfast burritos should, pretty much, assume the risk of any discomfort, etc. Under this line of reasoning, it’s like claims about playing with matches: a person runs a high risk of getting burned.

(Perhaps the smaller class of McDonald’s burrito-eaters comprises those who don’t get sick.)

What do you think?

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.30.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

Friday will be sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise today is 5:20 AM and sunset is 8:25 PM. The moon is a waxing crescent with four percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Last night, Elon Musk unveiled a new, and now crew-capable, version of his Dragon space capsule. The ship can hold up to seven people, and more remarkably, it’s reusable and capable of landing under its own power:

America’s best days of space travel are yet ahead.

On this day in 1911, the first Indianapolis 500 takes place.

Here’s the concluding game in this week’s Puzzability’s series, Out of State:

This Week’s Game — May 26-30
Out of State
We’re taking a road trip for the unofficial start to summer. For each day this week, we started with the single word that completes a state’s nickname in the phrase “The ___ State.” Then we hid it in a sentence, with spaces added as necessary. The answer spans at least two words in the sentence and starts and ends in the middle of words. The day’s clue gives the sentence with an interstate sign in place of the nickname.
Example:
We learned that younger members of the local Native American triinterstateaged just a few years living on the reservation once they became adults.
Answer:
Beaver (tribe averaged)
What to Submit:
Submit the nickname (as “Beaver” in the example) for your answer.
Friday, May 30
It was difficult not to be jealous of a group I saw with a tour guide talkininterstatetly about the local sites, while ours just droned on.

Business, Corporate Welfare, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government

What’s an Entrepreneur?

by  • 

I would think, and perhaps you would think, too, that an entrepreneur is a man or woman who runs a private business, bearing the risks and demands of his or her enterprise. 

For this reason, Americans are sympathetic to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial efforts – we admire the creativity and effort of business men and women who take risks to build something productive.

Knowing Americans admire entrepreneurs, a small class of publicly-funded men, and the lobbyists and press flacks who represent them, frequently take the concept of genuine private entrepreneurship and apply it to big, taxpayer-funded projects for their white-collar friends. 

They use a clear word for their darker needs.

They’re neither poor nor otherwise disadvantaged, these public men.  Nor are they among those who deservedly seek modest assistance for genuine hardships. 

Instead, these well-fed few push themselves to the front of the line, seeking large payments (often amounting to millions), for their projects and those of their oily friends, on a public tab. 

It’s in this way that – absurdly – public institutions, managed by public men who have never worked in private enterprise, fund so-called entrepreneurs in residence at public schools, build innovation centers, and pay for the marketing services of press agents and lobbyists to lap still more from a public bowl.

For all that they take, they take one thing more: they distort language and steal words in an attempt to make their public, white-collar welfare look like private enterprise.

It’s not. 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.29.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday in Whitewater looks to be a beautiful day: sunny, a high of seventy-six, and east winds of five to ten mph.

The Tech Park Board meets this morning at 8 AM.

On this day in 1953, two explorers reach the top of the world:

At 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, become the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which at 29,035 feet above sea level is the highest point on earth. The two, part of a British expedition, made their final assault on the summit after spending a fitful night at 27,900 feet. News of their achievement broke around the world on June 2, the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and Britons hailed it as a good omen for their country’s future.

On this day in 1848, Wisconsin becomes America’s 30th state:

1848 – Wisconsin Enters the Union
On this date Wisconsin became the 30th state to enter the Union with an area of 56,154 square miles, comprising 1/56 of the United States at the time. Its nickname, the “Badger State,” was not in reference to the fierce animal but miners who spent their winters in the state, living in dugouts and burrowing much like a badger. [Source: “B” Book I, Beer Bottles, Brawls, Boards, Brothels, Bibles, Battles & Brownstone by Tony Woiak, pg. 37]

Puzzability’s Out of State series continues with Thursday’s game:

This Week’s Game — May 26-30
Out of State
We’re taking a road trip for the unofficial start to summer. For each day this week, we started with the single word that completes a state’s nickname in the phrase “The ___ State.” Then we hid it in a sentence, with spaces added as necessary. The answer spans at least two words in the sentence and starts and ends in the middle of words. The day’s clue gives the sentence with an interstate sign in place of the nickname.
Example:
We learned that younger members of the local Native American triinterstateaged just a few years living on the reservation once they became adults.
Answer:
Beaver (tribe averaged)
What to Submit:
Submit the nickname (as “Beaver” in the example) for your answer.
Thursday, May 29
Everyone rode doninterstategotiate the steep paths of the canyon.

Business, Film

“The Shawshank Residuals”

by  • 

An enduring, deserved success:

Bob Gunton is a character actor with 125 credits to his name, including several seasons of “24” and “Desperate Housewives” and a host of movie roles in films such as the Oscar-winning “Argo.” Vaguely familiar faces like his are common in the Los Angeles area where he lives, and nobody pays much attention. Many of his roles have been forgotten.

But every day, the 68-year-old actor says, he hears the whispers—from cabdrivers, waiters, the new bag boy at his neighborhood supermarket: “That’s the warden in ‘Shawshank.’ ”

He also still gets residual payments—not huge, but steady, close to six figures by the film’s 10th anniversary in 2004. Since then, he has continued to get “a very substantial income” long past the age when residuals usually dry up.

“I suspect my daughter, years from now, will still be getting checks,” he said.

Via The Shawshank Residuals @ Wall Street Journal.

New Media, Press

The Newspaper that Touts Chilling Effects

by  • 

One would think that a newspaper – in the business of printed and online speech – would wish to reduce chilling effects, that is, threats of lawsuits or government action that might intimidate citizens into refraining from the exercise of free speech rights. 

One might think that about some newspapers, but for the Janesville Gazette a lawsuit against a student for comments about his UW-Whitewater professor is a chance to opine against online speech, generally.

I have no idea about the merits of this case (it may be sound), but it’s simply strange for a newspaper to seize on this as a general warning against speech. 

Here’s the Gazette‘s editorialist on what this lawsuit says to students in America: “Other students, in college or high school, should proceed with caution before risking similar fates amid today’s proverbial Wild West of online commentary.”

See, Our Views: Students must proceed with caution in criticizing instructors.

Next up for the editorialist: (1) Keep Off My Lawn, (2) Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: Benign Media or Radical Plot Against America? and (3) Why Don’t You Leave the Thinking to Movers and Shakers Like Me?

The editorial follows the line of argument in Greg Peck’s blog post on the subject from last week.  

Reading the Gazette is sometimes a sad and frustrating experience.  It’s like watching a ship slowly sink while the crew fuss with passengers over whether everyone has the right dress for a formal seating. There’s a value to proper attire; formal clothing means little when waves are washing over the ship’s decks.  

The Gazette‘s saddled with a crony-capitalist editorial opposition to free markets, has an editorialist-blogger who whines about how hard he has it (in working-class Janesville), publishes editorials that distort developments at Whitewater’s meetings, and frequently pushes views that are mediocre effort after mediocre effort in defense of insiders’ big spending. 

It’s a multi-million-dollar paper where all that money’s not enough to arrest decline, not enough (seemingly) to cure a profound cluelessness about new media. 

Wisconsin has a robust blogosphere, of left, center, right, and libertarian.  I’d never be so foolish as to trade places with those of an old media outlook. There are precious few independent bloggers anywhere who’d make that trade. 

Stodgy, befuddled, and perhaps embittered: a whole world of independent publishing and free expression is simply a ‘wild west’ to this editorialist.  One could remind of Clay Shirky’s Shock of Inclusion repeatedly, but it would either be misunderstood or simply ignored.  

That’s why, despite generations of publishing, old newspapers struggle, while other, dynamic papers and websites flourish.     

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 5.28.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

It’s already the middle of the week, and we have a mostly cloudy Wednesday ahead, with a high of seventy-three.

The Community Development Authority’s Seed Capital Screening Committee meets today at 3 PM, and its Board of Directors at 5 PM.

Google’s latest self-driving car has discarded the steering wheel:

Google has revealed it plans to build its own self-driving cars from the ground up, per an announcement from founder Sergey Brin at the Code conference Tuesday. The company revealed one such car to Recode, a highly compact two-seater without a steering wheel.

Google had previously been retrofitting Toyota Priuses and Lexus SUVs with its self-driving technology. The cars were approved last week for use on public roads in California, and Google demonstrated the technology’s ability to navigate complex traffic situations in cities at the end of April.

The prototype Google revealed differs from the Priuses and Lexuses in that they can’t let humans take over the job of piloting; they are completely controlled by the onboard computer. In addition to lacking a steering wheel, the Google-built car also has no accelerator, no brake, no mirrors, no glove compartment, and no soundsystem (your tiny smartphone speaker will have to do). The cars are capped at a modest 25mph and are started and stopped by a button.

Perhaps, in time, many cars will be without steering wheels.

Here’s Puzzability‘s Wednesday game in its Out of State series:

This Week’s Game — May 26-30
Out of State
We’re taking a road trip for the unofficial start to summer. For each day this week, we started with the single word that completes a state’s nickname in the phrase “The ___ State.” Then we hid it in a sentence, with spaces added as necessary. The answer spans at least two words in the sentence and starts and ends in the middle of words. The day’s clue gives the sentence with an interstate sign in place of the nickname.
Example:
We learned that younger members of the local Native American triinterstateaged just a few years living on the reservation once they became adults.
Answer:
Beaver (tribe averaged)
What to Submit:
Submit the nickname (as “Beaver” in the example) for your answer.
Wednesday, May 28
The school princiinterstateday with the field trip chaperones to help prepare them for tomorrow’s trip.

Local Government

The Truth About Preferential Treatment

by  • 

Cases in which a person successfully demands preferential treatment from government (that is, an unfair advantage not available to other residents), require two parties, not one. 

There must be an entitled man or woman who demands access or opportunities that would routinely be denied to others, but also a craven official who acquiesces to that selfish request. 

What Reagan said about the Soviets’ need to cooperate toward arms control is true in this context, also: it takes two to tango.