Fast Food Madness

Great story set at a fast food restaurant.

It's up there with the guy who started a fight in a McDonald's parking lot, died because he wouldn't give up, and then his parents sued McDonald's.

Other good stories include the impatient cop who pulled his gun on Dunkin Donuts, demanded the coffee NOW, and then didn't pay for it and the woman who (rightly) called 9-1-1 because a McDonald's took her money, said they were out of McNuggets and refused to give her money back. The insanity came from what she said to the operator. (I'm pretty sure all of this shit happened in Florida.)

NYTimes Bad Reporting Edition

The NYTimes is taking some heat for a character assassination they did on Yale's QB from last season. In the follow up story they buried this gem in the last paragraph:

Magazu has confirmed that the complaint was of a sexual assault but said that the encounter was in fact consensual.

 I didn't care before but now I really want to know why and how someone consented to being sexually assaulted?

Chips vs Wings

Wings are an east coast thing. I didn't know.

Chris Blattman's cool link

Chris Blattman discovered this great comment from another guy's blog that I'm reposting on mine.

It suggests ways to decide whether to use a pool that an NGO in Kenya owns but feels guilty about using or something.

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

I give extensive thanks to Chris so he doesn't try to beat me up or something.

Some random genius

Some random genius named Sarah Walker wrote this gem the comments of a TED talk:

The trouble with natural happiness is that it can be so short-lived. [. . .] Synthetic happiness on the other hand can be a choice of a state of mind and can therefore be more permanent. I think people have trouble with the words 'synthetic' and 'natural' where emotionally speaking, 'natural' is seen as superior. If we were to change the words to 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' maybe people would have an easier time accepting the notion that happiness can be a [choice]

I suspect she is right. Maybe Dan Gilbert or some marketing students will do an experiment.