24/7 Technology is one of the things that make America Great.
Some things—like drug stores, coffee shops and diners—are just meant to be open 24-hours. It is expected that the drug store will be open when you need it and that the diner will always have a light on for you. And when they don’t, it [...]
Posts from ‘January, 2010’
Flowers: any hour of the day or night [Open 24/7]
When it comes to grass v. corn, I choose delicious [food]
Remember how the food police told us that if we were callous enough to eat beef, we should at least limit ourselves to the grass-fed variety. After all, they said, feeding cows grass is the natural way to do it, and before massive post-war agricultural subsidies corn-fed beef was nonexistent.
Well it turns out that claim [...]
They thought car radios were dangerous too… [cell phone ban]
It strikes me that a lot of the hysteria about the dangers posed by cell phones in cars boils down to little more than plain old technophobia.
After all, there is no reason to believe that cell phones are uniquely distracting. Both academic studies and surveys suggest that they are in fact less of a distraction [...]
Free Refills Roundup [Constitutional Amendment edition]
Free Refills are part of the American spirit and we tend to talk about them a lot–particularly on Twitter. So once I week every one in a while, I post the best of the “Free Refills” chatter from the web. The fourth edition of the Free Refills Roundup features calls for a Free Refills constitutional [...]
Cell phones aren’t dangerous, toddlers are.
For months I’ve been saying that when it comes to distracted driving, passengers—crying children, in particular—pose a greater accident risk than cell phones. That is why I proposed banning carpooling.
It seems that others are finally catching on. Today the Consumer Reports blog ran a post about how dangerous diving with kids can be and the [...]
This is where I draw the line [distracted driving]
Regular readers of this blog know that I am very skeptical of schemes to ban the use of cell phones in cars. After all, there is little reason to believe that using a cell phone while driving is any more distracting than, say, adjusting confusing radio controls or driving around with a car full of [...]
#25. Delivery
The French—and professional food whiners like Michael Pollan—might have the time to enjoy an organic, locally-grown, slow-food lifestyle. But for the rest of us, shopping at the farmers’ market all day and slaving over a stove all night is simply out of the question.
We don’t have time to chop vegetables, marinade meat or sit around [...]
Will the soda tax drive New Yorkers to the bottle?
Governor Patterson’s cent-per-ounce soda tax might be the most regressive new tax proposal around (as was pointed out in a previous post by commenter John), but it still has a silver lining—at least for the beer companies.
The New York Times’ City Room Blog reports that if passed, the soda tax would make some six-packs of [...]
Give it cupholders and I’ll take it [Americanization]
America, they say, is a melting pot. We welcome foreign people and products to our shores with open arms (particularly if they are sleek, Asian-manufactured electronic products).
But is America really ready to embrace a $3,000 Indian “People Car” which gives new meaning to the terms “sub-compact” and “bare bones?” TBM’s Matthew DeBord thinks so—provided that [...]
Are soda taxes coming to NYC? [action alert]
Last summer the sushi-and-tofu crowd tried to get Congress to pass soda taxes as part of the healthcare legislation.
Of course, levying extra taxes on American staples like Coca-Cola and orange juice is about as popular as a tax on Christmas cards so the proposal didn’t really go anywhere. But now it appears that the state [...]
