July 2023 – Everydave Life

July 24, 2023

Don’t Get Burned…

One thing you can count on being extraordinarily hot is a Texas summer. Another thing you can guess may be extraordinarily hot (but sometimes fails to be) is fried fast food as it’s served. In both cases it seems like the proper response is to be prepared. But some people are foolish and some, perhaps crazy like a fox when it comes to it. Two little things from the past week.

It’s been hot, even by Texas standards this month. Where I am, we’ve had at least 16 days above 100F (38 Celcius) already and there’s little sign of any major changes coming our way. Of course, the average high is 95 or better until nearly the latter days of August, so it’s not too mind-bending. One thing that is that – and hand-burning – is how hot it gets inside parked cars during the day. That leads to the inevitable tragedies we hear of every year with children dying when left in a parked car in parking lots by “forgetful” parents.

Our car gets rather brutally hot, parked on a sunny street. It only takes one burnt thumb and forefinger to learn to either touch only the plastic part of the seatbelt when you get in, or to use something like a rolled up piece of clothing if you need to touch the metal clasp. Even the black steering wheel can cause an “ouchy” if you grip it too tightly until the air con kicks in, a few minutes after you take off. You get used to it and know how to deal with it. But it got me curious… just how hot is it? So, one day this week, I took our kitchen meat thermometer out and placed it on the dashboard about two hours before I needed to go out. As you can see from the picture above, the verdict is…

Nearly 160 degrees. Or about 70 Celcius for non-Americans. It actually rose above that the next time I did the same. About the same temperature you need chicken to be to declare it “cooked.” A good reminder why not being forgetful when it comes to children, or pets for that matter, inside cars in summer. And perhaps a possible new feature for upscale sedans – just put a metal griddle on the dashboard, and people can throw some bacon and an egg on it ten minutes before they want to leave and voila – brunch on the go!

People touching metal parts of a car interior this summer aren’t the only ones getting burned this summer though, it seems to me.

As you may have seen in the news last week, a McDonald’s in Florida was sued successfully for $800 000 by a mother who says her four-year old was dangerously burned and “scarred for life” when a hot Chicken McNugget fell on her leg as the mom passed the box of them to the child in the car.

The mother says her daughter, Olivia, sustained a second-degree burn on her thigh when the nugget fell on her. She also suggested that somehow the fried chicken bit got stuck between the leg and the seatbelt and couldn’t be dislodged. I for one would sure need to see some sort of visual demonstration of how an inch-wide chunk of meat can get stuck like that and not removable until it caused serious medical problems. McDonald’s, or at least the franchise owner, Upchurch Foods, had offered the family over $100 000, doubtless thinking that they’d probably spend close to that anyway, on lawyers if it went to court. But the burn-ee’s mother declined and somehow got the jury to side with her, giving her $400k for “pain and suffering” and an equal amount for “future pain”. They noted there was no prominent warning on the package saying contents were “dangerously hot” and, one might guess, urging people not to press hot chicken against one’s leg long enough to sustain a burn.

Now it seems to me that anyone who’s careless enough to pass supposedly boiling hot food to a small child in a car , expecting them to eat it carefully without supervision, someone who then couldn’t engineer flicking the piece out from where it was is not the type who’s likely going to change her behavior because there was “Warning : Hot” printed on the box or the take-out bag. And I’m not callous enough to not feel sorry for the kid, regardless of how bad that burn might really have been. But the restaurant manager notes they still see the family at their drive through and Olivia still orders McNuggets. Hardly seems like she was “scarred for life” by the event, does it? It seems like the one really getting burned in this case was the restauranteur.

What happened to personal responsibility? What happened to learning from mistakes? Did any of us grow up without at least once accidentally touching a hot stove or a plugged-in iron? Has anyone not popped something into their mouth straight out of a microwave and instantly needed to spit it out because their mouth was on fire? It happens. You learn from it and move on. Be more careful. Don’t touch a hot stove or iron. Wait for a bit before eating something with cheese that was being nuked for five minutes. Don’t serve small children dangerously hot food. We don’t sue the appliance maker or the food packager.

Ron White famously says “you can’t fix stupid.” But maybe he might ask “why would you want to if it pays so well?”

July 17, 2023

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Canadians should feel flattered by their big neighbor to the south. That occurred to me when popping a bit of change from a purchase into my pocket a few days ago.

I noticed a very shiny, seemingly uncirculated quarter among the other coins, and looked more closely. My dad was a serious coin collector, and while I don’t share his passion for collecting every year’s edition of every coin nor in looking for occasional misprinted ones that sell for a lot amongst other collectors I do like looking at coins. I try to collect the sets of the different commemorative designs, like the American state quarters and parks ones. The coin that caught my eye was a 2018 quarter for Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park, shown above.

The Voyageurs quarter had a picture of a loon on the front. Fair enough pick for that park; the Common Loon is the state bird of Minnesota. Loons, less you only know of the act-strange-on-the-street human form, are a large, black-and-white duck-like bird that lives on remote lakes and has a haunting call thought to be the “soundtrack of the wilderness” by many. What really struck me was it seemed like I’d seen that image before!

Not quite, but it sure looks a lot like a “loonie” – the Canadian dollar coin with a very similar looking loon swimming on a similar looking, pine-ringed lake. They came into being in 1987, when Canada decided to get rid of $1 bills and replace them with gold-colored coins which soon were nicknamed for the bird on the front.

Take a look at the Minnesota quarter, flipped over and next to the Canadian dollar.

In fact, the whole concept might have been borrowed from Canada. They began issuing special designs for coins back in 1967, the Centennial year, and began putting out a series of Provincial quarters in 1992, a different design for each province. The States began issuing State quarters in 1999. They’ve since expanded to do National Parks, famous women and on the dollar coins (not widely popular here yet) American presidents. Looks like Canada was onto something there.

It actually makes sense. Mints tend to lose money – cost of doing business, some would say – since it costs money to buy the metal and actually manufacture coins. The Canadian mint seemed to realize early on there were a fair number of collectors like my dad who scoured through every pocketful of change and went to shows to buy and sell old coins. Why not give them ones they’d want to collect and eliminate the middle man? An ordinary quarter with the typical Canadian moose design might go unnoticed; one with a special picture (like the Pink Ribbon ones to highlight breast cancer awareness) gets noticed more and if you put out a silver-plated one in nice little box and sell it at the post office, that 25 cent piece might get the mint back $10. Some years it’s been said the mint made money, making money if you will – turned a profit due to the sales of collectors editions.

Canada’s been known to borrow widely from American culture, from sound-alike rock bands to look-alike game shows on TV. It’s nice to feel like for once, it’s going the other way. Americans are taking the Canadian good idea and running with it. Or swimming with it in the case of the loon!

July 3, 2023

Where ‘Influential” And ‘Useful’ Diverge

A tale of two magazines.

Time recently put out a special issue branded “the 100 most influential companies.” It contained quite an array of companies, some of whom didn’t seem like they were really all that influential in the grand scheme of things (John Deere? Taco Bell?), some of which seemed incorrect honestly (including Major League Baseball – you probably know I am a big baseball fan and it’s really the only sport I follow closely, but c’mon … attendance keeps dropping, a 20-year long trend, TV ratings are down generally and there are problems with even getting games on the air in some cities due to a cable company’s bankruptcy. Hardly seems to be influencing basketball or football.) . Hoka ? A brand of “distinctive chunky” running shoes. Changing the world or even its industry? I wouldn’t have thought so. Crocs possibly, and yes they are on the list too. Others certainly are valid and annual members of the list. Say Apple, for example. And some are probably valid but leave me wondering “why”? Take Skims.

I hadn’t ever heard of Skims, but apparently it’s shapewear, rather like Spanx, from a company run by Kim Kardashian. Well, no arguing that Kim is influential. For starters she is the first woman who started out in a porno movie that somehow turned that not into shame and a shadow hanging over her career, as well as the scorn of most feminists, but into being some sort of feminist icon and role model. Have to hand it to her on that, it must have been a difficult bar to hurdle.

Mostly though, what struck me was that many of the companies are tied into AI. For instance Microsoft, lauded mainly for its “billion dollar investments in AI.” Or Metaphysics, a company which apparently came up with a “digital avatar of Elvis Presley” which was shown on America’s Got Talent. And of course Open AI, a company vaulted into headlines recently because of its Chat GPT product.

Certainly influential, of that there can be no doubt. But are they beneficial? Who’s asking that? Even the company’s CEO Sam Altman is suggesting the industry be regulated and Time note “little doubt AI will make many jobs obsolete.” Altman admits “you can’t trust a voice you hear over the phone anymore” because of his product’s ability to mimic voices and the magazine warn of his apps’ “disconcerting inability to separate truth from fiction” which hasn’t stopped people using it for things ranging from homework to financial planning.

It makes me ask the fundamental question “how is this good in any way for humanity?” Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

Meanwhile, I looked at the latest issue of nature publication Audobon. It had some winners from a photography contest it ran – impressive images all – but also two pages devoted to the dilemma they are seeing manifest itself, namely photos being submitted that look real but in fact are AI fakes. They even tried the software to try to duplicate some of the winners’ shots and came unnervingly close on several. And the programs are still in their relative infancy. Right now the editors employ a litany of tests, such as looking at the original digital file to see that the imbedded info seems accurate, talking to the photographers and having imaging experts go over shots pixel by pixel to make sure they seem real. But detecting the frauds is getting more difficult by the week.

In their context, it matters not only because you want to reward photographers who have skill, patience and have captured a memorable scene (not some nerd who puts info into a computer program and makes a make-believe picture) but because we need to trust what we see. In nature, much of what is known about rare wildlife is through photo documentation. See a mountain lion in a county which hadn’t recorded one for 60 years? A photo of it will let the naturalists know they are still around. The search for the elusive and exceedingly rare Ivory-billed Woodpecker and other types of nearly extinct wildlife? Eyewitness accounts aren’t considered good enough by many experts or the government (who decide on how to protect such animals and their habitat) and they generally want photos. What happens when any Tom, Dick or Harriet can conjure up realistic-looking photos in a few seconds on their I-pad?

Of course, the ramifications go miles beyond that and are more serious. What happens to society when we can literally no longer be sure what we are seeing in photos or videos, or hear in audio clips, is real and not someone’s fantasy creation?

It all seems like a Pandora’s box that shouldn’t have been opened, and I wish more of the 100 most innovative companies would actually work on innovating with things that will help humanity and the planet…. not threaten it more than it already is.