For all it's inefficient waste, the government is generally better than the private sector at not killing us all for the sake of an extra ha-penny on the dollar. Look at the banking giants, the housing bubble, the Gulf of Petroleum, the endless stream of toxic and dangerous "goods" from China, etc. Everywhere private industry goes, it robs and murders us, then robs our corpses again. As broken as our government is, in general I'd choose it over an unregulated corporate equivalent every time.So you should be surprised that I'm about to applaud a corporation that recently did something that has traditionally been done only by our government. Yesterday, a corporation called Space X launched the Falcon 9 orbital rocket from Cape Canaveral. I must admit I'm dramatically impressed by the fact that putting a human into orbit now costs a quarter of what it did just two days ago. That's freakin' amazing! It's a good step towards a non-zero Drake equation. Hooray Space-X! Let's get off this rock!
Read more about the Falcon 9 at: Daily Kos
3 comments:
The Shrek glasses are a poor example of bad business. The glasses met all current standards, but aren't up to new standards that AREN'T EVEN FINISHED YET and so McDonald's chose to recall them. In other words, McDonald's chose to take a huge PR hit and probable loss of revenue to recall these glasses which meet all current standards. Clearly this isn't about squeezing another ha-penny out of their dollar.
"McDonald's said the U.S.-made glasses met federal guidelines for cadmium under testing conducted by a CPSC-approved lab. CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson, however, said the glasses fall short of standards for the toxic metal that the agency is in the process of developing."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100604/ap_on_he_me/us_cadmium_shrek
Additionally, the problems in the housing market are just as much the fault of the morons who signed mortgages they could not afford as the greedy bastards who sold them those mortgages. If you aren't smart enough or well educated enough to understand every word of a contract that will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and be in effect the next 20-30 years of your life, you damn well should hire a lawyer who can explain it all to you.
My first comment vanished. Weird.
I removed the Shrek glasses from the article. I hadn't read enough on the topic, and didn't realized McDonald's was kinda being progressive on this. I've known about Cadmium's toxicity and radioactivity since junior high, so I assumed they'd know about it, too. I hadn't read a complete article on the cups because I haven't set foot in a McDonalds in over four years (and in another 3 or 4 before that).
For the record, cadmium's been regulated in paint for some time. Every tube of Cadmium Red sold in the U.S. in the last 30 years or so has a label that says something like "Warning: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer." or "Caution: Contains Cadmium. Do not spray apply. Keep out of reach of children."
As to your defense of the predatory loan services, I think you're being unrealistic. In fact, it sounds to me like you're siding with the con artists instead of their victims. No offense intended.
The predatory lending climate was all about fooling people into thinking they could afford a house when they really couldn't. I remember the ads on TV: "Why rent an apartment, when you could buy a home for the same money or less?"
I don't want to get in a big argument about it, but I will say I think your perspective is very different from the average American's, because you've spent so much time working in legal offices. To you, running something past your lawyer is no big deal. For most folks, though, it's not even on their radar.
Someone who thought they'd never be able to afford a home (until seeing one of those commercials or meeting a smooth-talking real estate agent) also probably felt they couldn't afford to hire a lawyer. Given the choice between buying a house or seeing a lawyer, they chose house.
It was a poor decision, but it was one they'd been trained towards by all those credit-card documents, and terms of service. They certainly couldn't afford to hire a lawyer every time they installed new software, or every time their credit card company sent them a piece of mail. They developed a bad habit of skimming the long contracts and signing them. And those predatory loans were designed to look similar to those credit-card statements. The monthly house payments would start at a level less than these folks were paying for their credit-cards, so they never thought of it as being something you'd hire a lawyer for.
I know, because I came within a hair's breadth of buying a house in ABQ and signing one of those mortgages. I got a bad feeling about it, and backed out on signing day, but I couldn't put my finger on what the problem was at the time. Had I been a little less sensitive to my instincts, we'd have been in trouble down the road. Which would have really sucked, because a year later we realized we didn't really want to live in Albuquerque any more. :)
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