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You Can’t Get There From Here

I saw a confused guy in his late 20s walking in the hallway on the third floor. He walked right past a double set of elevators and past two doors, each with huge lighted signs above them saying “Exit,” each with second signs saying “Stairway,” and each with huge windows through which you can clearly see the stairways.

As he passed the first door, the double set of elevators, and the second door, he looked right at them as if he was looking for a particular place.

Since he looked confused, I asked him.

You seem lost, can I help you find something?

He replied, quite perturbed,

I’m just trying to find a way back to the first floor!

I replied back,

Well, you might want to try that door (pointing at the door) or the elevators (pointing at the elevators).

He stood silent and still confused. I continued,

This door right here has stairs that will take you downstairs or the elevators right there will take you downstairs.

Still perturbed he turned, opened the door, and walked down the stairs. I honestly expected him to walk up the stairs. Really, I did.

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Right to Work versus a Right to Contract

My state is considering enacting a Right to Work law. Right to Work, who could be against that?! Everyone should have right to work, how could there even be a downside to that?

Here’s the downside. Right to Work laws conflict with our rights to enter into contracts and have them enforced.

Imagine this. You’re a farmer and you enter into a contract to sell your crop to a buyer for a set price. That gives you piece of mind. You’ll sleep better knowing that when your crops come in, you have a predictable income.

However, when it comes time to sell, the buyer tells you, “I found a cheaper seller.” You tell him, “But we have a contract.” He tells you back, “Sure we do, but this is a Right to Buy state. That means I have the right to buy from whoever I want.”

Any union depends on the right to enter into contracts and having those contracts enforced. The workers get together and negotiate with the employer for wages, hours, working conditions, benefits, etc. The employer can agree, counter-offer, or disagree. However, once a contract is agreed to and signed, both sides have to honor it. The workers have to work and the employer has to pay.

What Right to Work laws do is eliminate any duty on the part of the employer to honor the contract. In a Right to Work state employers can still form unions and enter into contracts with employers, however, the employers can hire workers not bound by the contract.

So, much in the same way my hypothetical buyer can simply ignore the contract and buy from someone cheaper. Employers in Right to Work states can ignore the contract they freely entered into and pay non-union members whatever they want.

I recently wrote that the real purpose behind workers compensation laws is not to help workers, but is to give employers immunity from tort lawsuits. Similarly, the real purpose of Right to Work laws is not to help workers, but is to give employers immunity from the enforcement of contacts entered into with employees.

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How I got a great deal on a trumpet because of Guitar Center (notice I didn’t say “from“)

It was a Friday morning and my son needed a student trumpet by the following Monday evening. I decided to try and order from Guitar Center because you can return it to the local store if something goes wrong. Spoiler alert, something went wrong.

On the website I ordered a student trumpet that was marked as “in stock,” but I immediately got an email saying it was back-ordered. I decided to call. I told the sales person that I needed it by Monday so I wanted to pay extra for next-day expedited shipping.

We went through the student trumpets they had in stock and the pickings were slim. I finally found one. It was nearly 600 bucks, much more than I wanted to spend, plus I paid an extra $56 for expedited shipping. But I needed it, so I bit the bullet and bought it.

I got an email confirming it would be delivered Monday. But checking my Guitar Center account showed that it was standard ground shipping. I called and was told that it was a error on the website, it was in fact expedited shipping.

Sure enough, come Monday morning I check UPS’ website and it’s marked as standard ground shipping. I won’t get it until Thursday.

I called up and no one could explain why my shipping was changed from next day expedited to standard ground. Of course they refunded my shipping. But that wasn’t really the point. I really wanted to know how I could specifically tell a salesperson that I needed it by Monday evening and that I needed to pay expedited next-day shipping and he could just ignore me.

Anyway, I ended up going to a pawnshop on my lunch hour and found a great Yamaha student trumpet for $150 bucks. When I finally got the trumpet from Guitar Center, I returned it for a full refund.

So I ended up getting a really good deal on a trumpet, thanks to Guitar Center’s inability to do what I paid them to do. Thanks!

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Raceless Movie: Like Mike

Yet another one of my movie non-reviews. This time it’s the NBA advertisement Like Mike.

The premise is that a 13 year old, black, 4 and 1/2 foot tall, orphan living at an evil orphanage, finds a pair of basketball shoes that might have been previously owned by Michael Jordan. He makes a wish on the shoes, gets struck by lightening, and suddenly he’s the greatest basketball player ever.

Through a series of events that could only happen in a movie underwritten by the NBA (seriously), the kid is signed to a play for the NBA.

He gets paired up with another player to mentor him, and you immediately know the kid will teach the mentor the real meaning of life, and eventually, the mentor will adopt him.

Anyway, the amazing thing about the movie is that is portrays an alternative universe wherein racism and even racial differences do not exist. In other words, the fact that the boy and mentor are black simply never comes into play.

The only other raceless movie I can think of involving a black main character goes back to Richard Pryor’s Brewster’s Millions.

I’m not a member of a minority. So I cannot fully imagine what it would be like to grow up subjected to racism. However, I certainly understand that if you grew up with racism and eventually became a movie director, you’d want to explore the problems with racism. Accordingly, you’d make films about the problems of racism.

However, maybe for us to get past racism we need more films showing us what our world could be like without it.

BTW, the movie was a contrived, ham-fisted, and utterly predictable piece of crap. My 10 year old son loved it, though. Which is not surprising as he was certainly a member of the intended audience for it.

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Is Reality Obsolete?

My son had the ATV out on the 80 acres of unplowed farmland behind our house. But he stopped to play the ATV racing game Pure instead.

When I was a kid I’d much rather have driven an actual ATV rather than a virtual one. However, back then video games consisted of indistinguishable blobs of pixels. And if an ATV game would have existed, it would have been a side scroller. It’s really hard to be immersed in a side scroller. Not to mention that it would have been played on a 27″ TV from across the room.

Have video games reached a point where they’re actually better than reality?

When I was a kid we’d play cops and robbers or war and run around pretending to shoot each other with toy guns. When we got older, we’d put on coats and sun glasses and do the same thing with BB guns.

I know kids still do similar things, because of the popularity of Nerf guns. But Nerf guns are not anywhere near as popular as Halo and or Call of Duty.

And what happens when virtual sex becomes mainstream? Will having pretend sex, where you can focus on any number of particular and obscene fetishes, be better than having real sex? Heck, maybe we’re already there. One common complaint I’ve been reading in advice columns are husbands who choose to masturbate to porn rather than have real sex with their wives.

And of course games such as the Sims and WOW are already replacing face to face friendships.

How long will it be until someone develops a virtual eating game which would lead to a situation where people would rather starve eating virtual food than eating real food?

On one hand, I’ll never be afraid of a time where people stop overeating or over-reproducing. Even if some people chose to do those exclusively in a virtual world, there will always be enough people to do it in the real world.

But I hope we never lose our sense of awe about the world. The beauty of a waterfall or a tree swaying in the wind. If we ever become more fond of a virtual world over our world, we’ll have even less incentive to make our real world a better place to live.

If we stop giving a fuck about trees, why would we ever protect forests? A society obsessed with a virtual world would clearly let the real world go down the drain.

This shouldn’t be too surprising as we’re already destroying the planet without an alternative virtual world in which to live.

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How to win $10 million in a slip and fall case

Slip and fall cases are usually the bottom of the barrel for lawyers. But every so often an attorney gets a good one and wins big. This is such a story. You can download the PDF of the opinion here.

Back in 2007 Holly Averyt was a truck driver delivering goods and merchandise to a Wal-Mart store.

She slipped and fell on a grease spill and ruptured a disc in her spine. She was unable to work as a truck driver after that.

She and her attorney went to trial and was awarded $15 million dollars. The state’s supreme court reduced the amount to $10 million. Which is still pretty damn good.

So how did Averyt’s attorney win so much money from a slip and fall case? It’s not like she’s quadriplegic or anything. She can still walk, lift stuff, and get around. She just can’t work as a truck driver.

Well, sometimes the plaintiff’s attorney wins the case. And sometimes the defense attorney loses the case. While the plaintiff’s attorney certainly did a great job, the blame for the size of the award falls onto the defendant.

Wal-Mart’s entire defense was that there never was a grease spill. In Wal-Mart’s opening statement to the jury their attorney adamantly denied that a grease spill ever occurred. He stated to the jury that the evidence admitted at trial will confirm that a grease spill never occurred.

But Averyt’s attorney didn’t give up. He had an apparent epiphany where he realized that someone must have cleaned up the spill, so he decided to track down that entity. It turns out it was a local government department. He contacted them and they emailed back an official document explaining what they did to clean up the spill.

Wal-Mart’s manager took the stand and testified that there was no grease spill. Averyt’s attorney used the document to contradict his testimony. The shit hit the fan.

To make a long story short, suddenly Wal-Mart’s manager and attorney remembered that, yes there was a grease spill. And suddenly they found tons of documents concerning the clean-up.

Wal-Mart’s new argument was that, there was a grease spill, but “boy oh boy did we do a great job in cleaning it up.”

Needless to say, the jury saw through their attempt to outright lie to them.

What’s funny is that Wal-Mart tried to blame the whole thing on Averyt’s attorney for ambushing them during the trial. Exactly how was Wal-Mart ambushed? They knew damn well that the grease spill actually occurred. It’s not like they were surprised by the government document. It’s not like they couldn’t have prepared for the contingency that the truth would be revealed at trial.

As the supreme court pointed out, Wal-Mart decided on trial strategy that failed. That’s no one’s fault but their own.

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It’s Official: Hollywood is out of ideas!

There are a lot of bad movies out there. Hollywood loves remakes, sequels, movies based on comic books, and worst of all, movies based on toys. For every original movie out there, e.g., Inception, there are thousands of completely unoriginal ones.

Case in point, and I have to stress that I’m not making this up, but Warner Bros. has bought the option to make a movie based on a comment made on Reddit.

Somebody over at Reddit asked what’s the fewest numbers of soldiers he’d need to go back in time and take over the Roman Empire. (The answer is actually pretty simple, to me at least. One guy with several nuclear bombs… but I digress.)

Anyway, the guy started writing up a story to go with his question. A subreddit was created and the community went crazy on the idea, coming up with graphics, fake movie posters, etc.

Can I just way wow? Wow-fucking-wow!

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The Scales of Justice

Justice is represented in the United States by a woman wearing a blind-fold holding a set of scales. She illustrates that justice is not about revenge, it’s about balance.

My state is planning on changing the balance of Workers’ Compensation law. The article I’m reading in Michigan Lawyer’s Weekly, which is not available online, states that the costs of employers providing Workers Compensation insurance by businesses is too high and needs to be changed.

The article has the following quote: The passage of the original Workers’ Compensation law,

was intended to help injured workers and get them back to work, and nothing else.

That “nothing else” is completely wrong. We as a society did not look around and say, “Gee, there are so many employees being injured at work, let’s create a system to help them.” No one thought that because there was a system in place which helped them. Employees were suing their employees in courts for tort negligence. And much to the employers’ chagrin, a lot of those employees were winning.

The real purpose of workers compensation laws was to give tort immunity to employers.

The employers were getting tired of having to go to court, go through trials, and having to pay the resulting verdicts. The purpose of workers comp laws was not to help employees, it was to help employers.

However, the rich and wealthy at the time could not simply make employers immune from tort liability, there would have been a workers’ revolution and we’d all likely be communist nowadays.

So they tweaked the immunity with a little balance. Employees could not sue their employers and get huge pain, suffering, emotional distress awards, but the employers had to provide de minimis economic stability to workers who were injured on the job.

The employers got their immunity while employees got certainty and peace of mind.

With that history in mind, what does it mean for employers who argue that workers comp costs too much money?

Do they mean that it costs more than removing the immunity and allowing workers to sue for tort liability? Of course not. That would cost much much more. There is no employer in Michigan who is arguing that workers comp laws should go away. They love their immunity from tort lawsuits.

What employers want is to tip the balance of the scales so far to their advantage that they get their immunity while employees get nearly nothing in return.

So for example, the changes that are expected to be made in my state would essentially eliminate workers comp for minimum wage employees. That means that it’ll be completely legal for employers to commit negligent acts and set up negligent and dangerous conditions in the workplace, and injured employees will have absolutely no legal recourse.

So the next time you hear some rich guy complaining that we need less government interference over business, go up to him and say, “I completely agree. Let’s get rid of the tort immunity given to you by the government through workers comp and let employees privately sue you for any torts you commit.” You can be sure he’ll start demanding that the government should interfere and protect him from that.

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Dangerous Protection

I’m not going to argue about whether a person or household should keep a gun for protection. Nor will I delve into empirical arguments that more children die from handguns in their own home than die from invaders, or vice versa. What I’m going to talk about is a particular argument in favor of keeping a gun at home for protection.

I was reading an advice columnist and a new wife wrote in about how her husband is obsessed with keeping a handgun in the house “for protection.”

She countered that it would not be safe to keep a loaded handgun in the house after they had kids.

People in the comments raised the argument that the solution is to keep the handgun unloaded and locked up in a safe.

Think about that. The purpose of the gun is to protect yourself in case someone invades your house and threatens you and your family. If you know in advance that someone is coming to harm you, you can leave or call the police. Therefore, the sole purpose to keep a gun in the house for protection is clearly for a sudden attack.

So how is that gun going to protect you when it’s unloaded and locked up? Are those thugs really going to wait until you run to the room where the key is then run to the room where the safe is, because you obviously can’t keep the key anywhere near the safe, pull it out from underneath the bed or from the closet, get the ammo, load gun, and then use it?

And are you really going to leave your wife and kids alone with those thugs while you run around the house as I described above?

If you want to keep a gun in a house with children, because you like taking it to the firing range and shooting targets… you’re being rational. Your desire to own a gun is a subjective pleasure while your desire to protect children makes sense.

However, locking up a gun intended for protection makes very little sense. The more you try to protect children, the less useful the weapon will be for protection. The more assessable the weapon is, the more likely it will be that children will be harmed.

This is one circumstance where you cannot have your cake and eat it too. You have to make a choice. A useless gun and safe children or putting your children at risk. Please choose wisely.

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Why Breastaurants Thrive when Restaurants Fail

I keep reading articles about how people are surprised that breastaurants such as Hooters are thriving in our poor economy, even as other mainstream restaurants are failing.

It makes sense to me. When an economy is bad, people have less disposable income, so they choose to eat out less. Mainstream restaurants have the same costs they always have, so they have to lower prices and quality to compete. If the prices and or quality gets too low, the restaurant goes out of business.

Strangely, the opposite is true of breastaurants. In poor economies breastaurants have an influx in the “quality” of waitresses to hire.

When the economy is good and jobs are plentiful, it’s easy for attractive women to find employment. Even if they have no jobs skills, when the economy is humming, they can find jobs as secretaries, bank tellers, etc. Men love having attractive women to have around the office.

But when the economy is bad, employers have to cut their staff to the bone, so having superfluous hotties around is no longer a viable option. Employers are compelled to hire qualified or over-qualified desperate applicants versus eye-candy.

This means that when the economy is bad, there’s a sudden glut of unemployed and skill-less hotties who are forced to lower their expectations for employment. While these women might never consider working for Hooters during good times, when a breastaurant offers the best pay per their lack of legitimate qualifications, they’ll take it.

So, even though the economy is bad and our disposable income is less, some men are still willing to spend what they have at breastaurants to see those unskilled, but god and silicon gifted, hotties.

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