Tag: galactically-stupid

Nightmare on Shepherd Drive

I will admit Wayne Dolcefino drew my ire years ago with one of his investigative reports that had some annoying consequences for me personally. I’m not going to go into details but it’s been well over a decade ago now and it’s water under the bridge. Anyway, this is 2010, and Wayne’s latest report about the Houston Police Department’s dubious speed traps got my undivided attention for a few minutes yesterday. As a former courier I would frequently see HPD officers, almost certainly including the mentioned and shown “ticket champion” Matt Davis, staked out at the 700 block of North Shepherd, in both directions (as it happens, I made a fair number of my paycheck deposits at the Capital One branch in the area).

The interesting part of the story here is from Victor Trevino, Precinct 6 Constable, who is quoted as saying:

If you’re writing tickets at this location, and we don’t have any complaints from citizens and you don’t have any accidents out here, then what is your logic?

…

I don’t think anybody in law enforcement or any public official is actually going to admit that [this is about money instead of public safety], but it’s what it would look like to the common-sense person.

It is indeed rare for me to praise a law enforcement officer. However, I applaud Constable Trevino for his efforts to defend the public image of law enforcement in and around the Houston area. It looks bad on not just HPD but every law enforcement agency in the area when these kind of speeding tickets are written for what must be obvious revenue generation as opposed to safety. Like it or not (and believe me, I don’t), the image of the entire city can be affected by what its police officers do.

So this is what I suggest to my readers: If you get a speeding ticket written by Officer Matt Davis, don’t get mad, get even. Plead “not guilty” and set it for trial. Talk to an attorney. If enough people do this instead of quietly pleading guilty and paying up, Officer Davis and HPD will get the message, because there is no way a million dollars’ worth of traffic tickets will ever make it to trial. And that message is that we as a community condemn the practice of traffic tickets for revenue generation.

Wayne’s story includes a link to a Google map showing the ticket hotspots for surface streets and the number of tickets issued. It’s worth a look, especially if you regularly travel the entire city as part of your job as I once did.

Pencil sharpeners are dangerous? Really?

The UK’s Daily Mail reports on one of the most bizarre examples of weapons control run amok. Charlotte Howard went to go buy pencils like any other 11-year-old schoolgirl who had exhausted her existing supply of writing utensils (or art utensils, as it appears from one of the pictures these may be colored art pencils).

But Charlotte was stopped cold by the cashier, who refused to complete the sale because the pack contained a pencil sharpener, which is classed as a “dangerous object.” It gets even better, though. Her mother, Allison Howard, was also refused the sale because she might give the pencils and sharpener to her daughter!

Thankfully, another store in the area completed the sale. However, to me, this is the truly shocking part (quoting the article):

…The 99p Store chain’s commercial director Hussein Lalani said he was ‘proud that our processes restricting the sale of certain items to under-18s have been proved to work’.

But he added: ‘We will look into the way this particular product is classified.’ Last year, the company made headlines after a 15-year- old boy was stopped from buying wine gums in case they contained alcohol.

Sure, the process works. There’s a saying from the early days of computer programming that applies here: Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). It would appear Mr. Lalani or one of the workers under his command (or maybe even elsewhere in the company) apparently programmed the cash register/point of sale systems with the garbage classifying a pencil sharpener as dangerous, and not surprisingly, that garbage came back out again.

Rather than celebrate that with a “hey, the computer is stupid and did what it was told” it would be more appropriate for Mr. Lalani to eat a double helping of humble pie, apologize profusely to the Howard family, and make sure this doesn’t happen again. This is a disgrace to civilized, intelligent society and deserves nothing short of absolute condemnation.

Redefining “work for hire”

A recent post to the ThinSkull Blog at advicescene.com highlights a case in Canada which takes the concept of “work for hire” as it relates to copyright and quite literally turns it upside down.

From the post:

John Hawley was sentenced to ten years in prison for armed robberies committed in his mid-twenties. After he was released on parole, John started a “successful commercial art and design studio in Toronto” (Hawley v. Canada, [1990] F.C.J. No. 337). When he served a part of his sentence in Frontenac Institution, a minimum security prison, he created a large painting entitled “Mount Whymper.” This work of art became the subject of a lawsuit he brought against the federal government claiming copyright in “Mount Whymper.”

The Federal Court denied his claim. It found that John was an employee of the Crown at all material times…

According to the court, if you’re in prison, you are [a federal employee], at least for the purposes of IP ownership. It ultimately doesn’t matter that your employment is forced and that your spare time is artificially limited and controlled.

Prison has two separate and distinct roles: punishment and rehabilitation. Unless a defendant is serving a sentence of life without parole or a sentence which will not expire until after the defendant does, rehabilitation cannot be ignored. Yet that is exactly what has happened here.

I find the notion that John was considered “an employee of the Crown” (what they call the government in Canada) ludicrous. The money John made from selling that painting would certainly help his rehabilitation quite a bit. It would also teach him a valuable lesson about making money in the world of honest people and decent society, a lesson that I wish more ex-felons were eager to learn.

Instead, the Canadian government has chosen to stunt John’s rehabilitation using a quite elastic interpretation of “work for hire” as it relates to copyright. The chilling effects here will be obvious: prisoners will simply resort to concealing their artistic works while serving their sentences and will be more clandestine about pocketing the profits. In short, the Crown is encouraging known criminals to keep acting like criminals, a dangerous and short-sighted move.

Shame on you, government of Canada. This galactically stupid leap of “logic” is due to set criminal justice back decades if not over a century.

Shocking and revolting: an unjust attack on Houston’s all-electric jitney

In 2010 Houston got its first all-electric jitney service, REV Eco-Shuttle. REV may be the only all-electric jitney service in the entire USA. However, just this past week, a revision to the city’s jitney ordinance threatens its continued operation.

Specifically, the revision increases the minimum seating capacity to operate a legal jitney from four passengers to nine. I have yet to learn of the official rationale behind this amendment, nor who is sponsoring it. I can think of no good reasons for this law to pass, and plenty of bad ones.

It has been suggested that the taxi lobby is behind this. Indeed, REV undercuts (by a dollar) the city-regulated $6 fare for taxis within downtown. However, unless I grossly misunderstand the current state of affairs, taxi drivers make far more money off of trips to and from the airports, and to and from bars after last call (REV ceases operation nightly at 2am Thursday through Saturday, and 10pm the other four nights of the week). It does not make sense for a taxi driver to concentrate strictly on trips within downtown when there are more lucrative opportunities available. There is also a segment of the population that will prefer to ride a real taxi over REV, no matter what. I personally fail to see how more choices are a bad thing.

Whatever the motivation, this absolutely, positively, galactically stupid amendment to the city’s jitney laws is unneeded and devoid of merit. REV has posted information on their website, linked above, on how to contact City Council members. Please, let them know this proposed law is a non-solution to a non-problem.

PayPal’s war on OpenCamp: a lesson in trust, business, and event planning

Until now, I’ve had no reason to write about Paypal. A couple of days ago, that changed. This is something every event planner should know about. Even if you are not an event planner by trade this could easily happen to you if you accept Paypal for payment on any kind of one-off event.

The OpenCamp blog posted today about how Paypal has repeatedly and continuously harassed those putting on the OpenCamp blogging/CMS conference in Dallas, TX, at the end of August.

John P. wrote this post, and states in part:

Over the past several weeks we’ve had 3-4 random calls from various people at PayPal, all of whom only identify themselves by their first name, none of whom have direct phone numbers or email addresses, and all of whom are asking the exact same questions over and over…

  • What is this OpenCamp thing?
  • How many people will be coming?
  • Why are you doing this?

Every time I go through the same speech with them. They are aware that we held WordCamp the past two years and have verified the previous registrations those years. They are aware that I personally have had a PayPal account for many years with them, and that I even have the Woopra account through them with far more volume than OpenCamp will ever have.

The article then goes on to explain this morning’s call from “Kathleen” in the “risk department.” As if that was not ominous enough (emphasis mine):

…they view events as being “extremely risky”. She told me that they would “rather close an account than have to eat a couple hundred dollars in disputed charges”. She went on to tell me that PayPal “doesn’t make much money off events”, and the bottom line was that they just don’t care about them.

Now, keep in mind the above: John is a long-time PayPal account holder and has helped host two WordCamps (WordPress-related convention). This is not just someone who signed up for Paypal this year and decided “okay, I’m going to run an event.” And they are still willing to come out and say in effect “we think events are extremely risky and don’t make us enough money.”

I’m not sure who to blame here. I don’t blame OpenCamp, that’s for sure. The theme of this blog’s past postings predisposes me to blame PayPal. I’m sure there are less sincere, less experienced, and less scrupulous event planners out there who have been part of the problem for PayPal. However, in the grand scheme of things, that’s a pathetic excuse to declare war on all event planners that use PayPal to accept payments, particularly the ones that have more than adequately documented that they are for real.

I view PayPal’s unwarranted attack on OpenCamp as “extremely risky” myself. This is not the kind of mess that a PR department wants to be left cleaning up. Shame on you, PayPal. It’s time to do the right thing: unlock the OpenCamp PayPal account, apologize, and quit treating event planners like second-rate customers.