Month: August 2007

Watch for that warning label, coming soon thanks to this lawsuit:

A Morgantown man, his mother and his friend are suing McDonald’s for $10 million.

The man says he bit into a hamburger and had a severe allergic reaction to the cheese melted on it.

As a severely allergic man, he took every reasonable precaution to ensure his own safety:

Jeromy did his part to make it known he didn’t want cheese on the hamburgers because he is allergic, Houston said.

He told a worker through the ordering speaker and then two workers face-to-face at the pay and pick-up windows that he couldn’t eat cheese, Houston said.

“By my count, he took at least five independent steps to make sure that thing had no cheese on it,” Houston said. “And it did and almost cost him his life.”

After getting the food, the three drove to Clarksburg and started to eat the food in a darkened room where they were going to watch a movie, Houston said.

Jeromy took one bite and started having the reaction, Houston said. One of the three immediately called the McDonald’s to let restaurant employees know they had messed up the order, but had to cut the call short when Jeromy started having a bad reaction, Houston said.

That’s right, he told people he was allergic but didn’t take the precaution of actually checking his food. Afterwards, while he’s reacting, his friends call the McDonalds.

Sounds like someone is digging for some free money here.

On the other hand, here’s an encouraging sign from our health industry:

The lawsuit alleges Jeromy “was only moments from death” or serious injury by the time he reached the hospital.

. . . .
McDonald’s representatives offered to pay half of Jeromy’s medical bills — which totaled about $700. When Houston became involved, he said the company offered to pay all the medical costs.

The cost of saving someone only moments from death: $1400.

Good work, health care industry!

Prices are going up for some commodities when the supply goes down and demand remains the same or goes up:

The wholesale price of cocaine has surged since December because of a shortage of the drug in 37 U.S. cities, including Milwaukee, according to a recent announcement by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Isn’t it stunning that this happens to drugs but not to petroleum, where price increases are always the result of mere greed on the part of the oil companies?

In between the bomp-bomp-bomp-bomps of the NPR All Things Considered intro music today, they teased me that one of their upcoming stories was about the possibility of reinstituting the draft.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, I have been hearing that for the last five years. In 2003, my own grandmother expressed fear of it, sure that Bush was going to impress my younger cousins and send them to Iraq.

To heck with it; I am on the bandwagon. Let’s restore the damn thing so that I don’t have to hear horror stories about that particular monster in the closet, children voters, a whole decade.

UPDATE: Here’s the story.

And I’ve reconsidered; if we reinstitute the draft, the same people worried about it coming back would take to the streets to demand its end, again. So we might as well not if they say we’re going to.

UPDATE II: James Joyner weighs in, sort of.

I guess that’s the message from this poll:

Ninety-one percent of Americans believe sending text messages while driving is as dangerous as driving after having a couple of drinks, but 57 percent admit to doing it, a poll released on Tuesday said.

The Harris Interactive survey commissioned by mobile messaging service Pinger found 89 percent of respondents believe texting while driving is dangerous and should be outlawed.

Even so, 66 percent of the adults surveyed who drive and use text messaging told pollsters they had read text messages or e-mails while driving. Fifty-seven percent admitted to sending them.

Please, mama government, save me from myself!

A good follow-up question would have been to ask how many obeyed the speed limits, existing laws designed to regulate behavior while driving, to determine how many of those people we could expect to heed new laws about texting while driving.

Oh, never mind.

In St. Ann, a municipality in northwest St. Louis County, its sales tax mainstay is not providing the tax revenue it used to:

When Northwest Plaza gets a cold, St. Ann sneezes.

Northwest Plaza is ailing right now, and St. Ann’s finances are following suit.

The city depends on sales taxes from the shopping mall for a big chunk of its revenue, and sales at the mall have been on a steady decline since 2000.

“We are extremely sales tax driven,” said Mayor Tim James. “When that money goes on hiatus, which is what we are hoping, and not gone for good, it really shakes things up.”

Since 2000, the city has reduced its work force to 92 from 112 and has begun charging residents for garbage pickup that used to be free. But so far, the city has kept up appearances. Potholes are being fixed, and the streets are being patrolled.

Ah, yes, the facade of providing core government services instead of blowing scads of cash on a water park that won’t break even on an annual basis (like so many of your neighbor municipalities are).

So what is the lesson about this that municipal leaders can learn? Partnering with land developers in crony capitalist schemes to increase your sales tax revenue and then spending that sales tax revenue as though it will continue to grow infinitely might put you into trouble when those sales taxes decline?

Nah; the lesson is thank goodness you’re not fools like those people in St. Ann!

Deep within this New York Times article lamenting that having only a couple of million dollars doesn’t make you nutso rich (a point of view with which I agree, actually), we get this bit of commentary with which I don’t:

David Koblas, a computer programmer with a net worth of $5 million to $10 million, imagines what his life would be like if he left Silicon Valley. He could move to a small town like Elko, Nev., he says, and be a ski bum. Or he could move his family to the middle of the country and live like a prince in a spacious McMansion in the nicest neighborhood in town.

But Mr. Koblas, 39, lives with his wife, Michelle, and their two children in Los Altos, south of Palo Alto, where the schools are highly regarded and the housing prices are inflated accordingly. So instead of a luxury home, the family lives in a relatively modest 2,000-square-foot house — not much bigger than the average American home — and he puts in long hours at Wink, a search engine start-up founded in 2005.

“I’d be rich in Kansas City,” he said. “People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”

Speaking on behalf of those of us in the middle of the country, please stay on a coast.

I don’t know who’s more of a self-important twit; the journalist writing the story, or the mcmillionaire.

MADD offers comments on Amtrak offering booze to high end rail customers:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving questioned whether $100 in free alcohol was too much.

“This sounds like a lot of credit toward possible overindulging,” said MADD spokeswoman Misty Moyse.

Considering that the overindulgers would be riding a train, I think MADD is out of place here, but kudos to CNN for finding political opposition for a business/travel story.