Tag: Musings

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To-Go California, You can order your meal but you’ll never eat.

Consider this a bit of a PSA.

I stumbled across this article in The Wall Street Journal about some new regulation for fast food and dine-in restaurants no longer providing plastic utensils with your order, unless you specifically ask for them.

Gone are the days when you can blow through a Taco Bell drive through and be assured that you’ll be able to eat all your meal.

You’d think, “No worries, I’ll use my hands.”

TRUE you could, but then you’ll find that the napkins you assumed would be in the bag, AREN’T.

Not to worry though, It’s not like you’ll have hot sauce in the bag either because those too you’d have to ask for.

So, Taco Bell, and other fast food options will kinda be a no option without a checklist. I’ll attempt to help by providing my personal Ordering checklist. I’ve got it on my phone, but I’m thinking a post-it note stuck to my car dashboard might be better.

Fast Food ordering:

  1. Food
  2. Drink
  3. Condiments (Ketchup, Hot Sauce, etc.)
  4. Straw
  5. Napkins at least 5 (More depending on type of food)
  6. Necessary utensils (Spork, Knife, etc.)
  7. Pull up to window. Pay.
  8. CHECK that meal is correct and necessary Utensils, Napkins, and condiments are present.
  9. IGNORE HONKING of impatient people waiting behind you!

Yet again The State of California is working to make your life better, through unintended consequences.

Most of the time, If you’re a working stiff, perhaps hourly you’ve maybe got a 30 minute lunch. If the company you work for is exceptionally generous you might even have 45 minutes or a whole hour!

With traffic in most areas around California industrial parks, for a working stiff, it works out like this;

5 minutes to get out of the building, 5 minutes to get out of the parking lot (due to everyone else trying to leave for lunch) 10 minutes to navigate the rest of the lunch hour traffic from all the other companies in the industrial park.

5 minutes at traffic lights and turning into the nearest strip mall or gas station parking lot.

Pull into shortest line for for one of the fast food places, (Wendy’s, Mac Donalds, Taco Bell, Starbucks, Panda Express, etc) wait in line 5 to 10 minutes (By which time you’re already late if you’re on a 30 minute lunch.)

Place your order, 5 minute wait for food, then mad 10 minute dash, (You’re late at this point if you have a 45 minute lunch,) back to the industrial park.

5 minutes waiting at lights, 5 minutes to get into parking lot and find parking space, 5 minutes to get back into building. (You’re on the raggedy edge of being late at this point if you have an hour lunch.)

You get back to your desk, ready to resume work and eat your meal while you’re working…

You open your bag of cold soggy burger & fries or tacos that started out as crunchy but which are now, anything but. Voilà you discover that the whole exercise was pointless because even though you could eat without the condiments, or perhaps even the utensils, you have nothing to wipe your hands with.

Your lunch sits in the bag, not getting any fresher until finally it smells disgusting and ends up in the trash. Thereby contributing to food waste and spewing CO2 into the air, in the dash to get lunch that was also a pointless waste of energy.

So tell me again how wonderful it is that you’ve eliminated basic necessities to protect the planet? Huuuummm?

I swear to God, all of these jackass politicians should be under mandatory orders to live with their proposed laws for six months before they can put them into action.

Not ONE of the political elites in any California city has ever had to punch a clock or be screamed at by an overbearing manager over their lunch break being 2 minutes too long.

All one need do is look at the distribution of restaurants in and around industrial parks in San Diego, Irvine, Victorville, Huntington Beach, The San Fernando Valley, Ventura, or Los Angeles to see that most of the “working class” lives what I’ve described above daily. Or they bring their lunch so that they can at least have a real few minutes of rest during their lunch break.

Now, thanks to the politician brain trust, this new anti utensil or condiment law will ultimately slow the food ordering process down even further.

Not that these Politicians give a shit. After all, if the workers aren’t spending money on fast food, after skipping breakfast to get the kids off to school, it means the workers will have more money that can collected as taxes.

Obviously the low wage earner who collects $12 a week in unspent lunch money doesn’t need it now do they?

Plus, the Arch Ministers of Public Health can chalk up a “Win” because obesity will be less of a problem. Who cares if the workers are starving while they toil away to earn enough to pay their tax burden? That just means they’ll die sooner and a whole new group can be imported from wherever.

Maybe the Politicians are hoping it’ll be mostly white people!

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Well… I’ll be dipped!

President Biden’s inauguration speech talked about unity in America.

At the time, I was like oh yeah, sure you have never been about unity, you senile old fossil.

But here we are 9 months later and sonofabitch if the old fossil hasn’t started to deliver.

Based on Biden’s poll numbers, he has created unity among Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians.

Unity against him!

That unification also extends to Vice President Kamala Harris whose personal poll numbers are even lower.

Biden’s been able to unify opposition to handgun bans. In 2014 it was about 50/50 pro or against. Now according to a recent poll, only 19% of persons polled are in favor of banning handguns.

He’s also unified 160 Senators (and counting) against his unconstitutional vaccine mandate. That’s a surprise too.

Some 53% of a recent politico poll believe that Biden is not mentally fit for the position of President. Wow! Another win for Biden’s unification speech.

In the same poll voters were asked;

If they believed he is a strong leader (56% said “No”)

If he is trustworthy (51% said “No”)

If he is honest (51% said “No”)

If he keeps his promises (52% said “No”)

Is Energetic (60% said “No”)

Is a clear communicator (57% said “No”)

Is stable ( 48% said “No”)

Is capable of leading the country (53% said “No”)

But, but… President Biden won the election with better numbers than President Obama. How then could he have lost so much support in so short a time?

One word.

Incompetence

I have to give credit where credit is due, Former President Obama is credited with saying something like; no matter what job you give to Joe, he’s gonna fuck it up. Perhaps one of the few things I agree with Former President Obama about.

Biden could have been dumb as a post but still done a decent job, if he’d surrounded himself with smart people. But instead, he seems to have surrounded himself with people who are his mental equals. Some of the things these people say are simply astounding.

So astounding, that I’ll often go to any video presentation of their speeches or comments to hear every word in context. I always finish viewing these videos with the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I usually can’t make it through one of these videos without having my brain reboot at least twice.

On the other hand, I’ve done due diligence in making sure the printed material I read wasn’t a bunch of snippets taken out of context and strung together. ( You know the way the press would often do with another former President… Just sayin.)

More’s the pity, they have said exactly the stupidest things that were reported in print. I’m always left with a cold pit in my stomach when I remember these are the people in control of our country.

On the bright side, The Biden Administration has in fact gone a long way to unifying the country.

Again, we must give credit where credit is due.

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My Momma used to say…

“We can’t do that anymore, because too many people abused the privilege.”

It’s with this in mind, that I’ve been wondering about making services like Twitter and Facebook simply illegal.

I know this flies in the face of freedom, it says that these businesses would be shut down and their employees would be unemployed. That is antithetical to most core American values.

Bear with me here.

Twitter has become a cesspool of hate speech, most everyone agrees that is a true statement. After all, Twitter itself has seen fit to invest in all manner of protections against hate speech, from algorithms to manual reviewers.

Twitter has been forced to endure lawsuits and congressional hearings regarding censorship. Twitter now employs a cadre of high powered attorneys and law firms at great expense just to protect itself from legal action from people who are offended by what they read on Twitter, and those who sue because their opinions are deemed to be hate speech or misinformation.

Facebook is in the same boat.

The simplest solution is to shut down these corporations.

Too many people misuse these services, in some cases these services are being misused to the point that illegal activities are being coordinated through them. Congressional investigations have stated this was true in the Jan 6th event.

This means that both corporations have become inadvertent accomplices to criminality. Not just locally, but on a worldwide level.

Twitter and Facebook were good ideas. Their founders were naive about the nature of humanity. It’s not their fault that people say things that other people do not like. I’d suggest that both corporations accept that as experiments in connecting and unifying people, they’ve essentially failed.

This failed experiment is also not their fault. They’ve proved that too much information exchange between people tends to amplify the worst aspects of social interaction.

Shutting down these kinds of services would tend to limit the negative and deleterious effects of all kinds of misinformation.

Think about it. There wouldn’t be anymore vaccine misinformation.

Local problems would remain local.

Politicians would have to focus on getting votes by traveling to communities and interacting with the residents of the community.

Unqualified or poorly educated journalists wouldn’t be unable to spread unvetted information.

Opinions would no longer be taken as facts without any proof.

Juries in court cases would be easier to impanel because there would be less likelihood of bias or prejudiced information tainting the jury pool.

I think the benefits of shutting down these kinds of services would greatly outweigh the negative consequences.

There would be a period of adjustment of course.

People would have to learn how to live with privacy again. A lot of people would have to deal with addiction issues related to endless scrolling. Neighborhood and Community events could help to address these addiction issues, and at the same time could more effectively address local problems.

Local print media would possibly see a resurgence thereby creating more jobs.

Our government would find it much easier to make sure that their messaging was clear and understood. They could focus on the mainstream news outlets and make sure their statements were read precisely.

Surely, the elimination of all this free exchange of hate speech would be in the best interests of public safety and security.

Just a thought…