For months now our kids have had to endure racial criticism from a little girl down the road. She spouts off slurs with wreckless abandon. Trying to pick fights with other kids in the neighborhood. Throwing objects at kids. Giving other kids the finger. Cussing out other kids. B–ch. A–hole. Trying to run down other kids’ self esteem by telling them they are fat or ugly. Accusing any child with tan skin of being an illegal immigrant. Announcing that people with a specific skin color are “stupid”.
When these things first started happening, we instructed our kids to ignore the little girl. To politely ask the little girl to stop or go away. This only made the little girl persist further. Causing issues with the kids on our street in general. Pestering them with insults. Pelting them with slurs. The other kids in the neighborhood finally end up taking refuge in someone’s backyard where the little girl can’t get to them.
We have since had an issue where neighborhood kids stood up to the little girl with the potty mouth. What did the little girl’s mother do? She called the police! How dare other kids yell at her daughter!
We now tell our kids to ignore this little girl, to immediately walk away when she comes around. Don’t say a word, just walk away.
Now that school has started these same kids are subjected to this little girl’s rantings at close proximity on the school bus. They have no recourse, no escape route. All the kids on the bus now get to enjoy hearing how people with a specific skin color are “stupid”.
How old is this little girl? I’m not sure but I’ve been told she is in second grade. I’m shocked to hear that. I wonder to myself, “How can such a young child learn such bile and hatred?”.
For those that are wondering; the little girl spewing racial slurs is black. The targets of her slurs are hispanic and white.
How is this not a hate crime? How is this not hate speech? How did the little girl learn such bile?
I think we all know the answer to these questions. We just aren’t allowed to say it because that act itself would be hate speech and we’d be arrested instead.
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I visited the Littleton, CO location this evening and had a wonderful meal with my wife. The food and service were both excellent. JR was our waiter in case he gets any extra kudos for this note and his excellent service.
That being said I must say how disappointed I am in the Melting Pot. I have been a patron of this location for 12 years. I don’t typically sign up for email offers or anything else but I have done so numerous times in addition to tonight. I noticed that the email offers come with discounts for birthday and anniversary celebrations. I was born in the month of May so I asked our server, JR, since I have not been receiving any offers if there was anything they could do for our bill this evening (I even showed JR my driver’s license to prove this was the month of my birth). JR went and asked the manager on duty tonight (05/28/2010) and came back with a very pathetic line given to him by the manager. The manager’s response was, “There is nothing they will do for us tonight and this is a corporate issue and I should take it up with them”.
Here is how this manager has offended a long time customer:
1) He could not have the spine to spend 20 seconds and visit the customer just to say “no” to the request.
2) He demonstrated a down right lack of responsibility by pushing off the request and blaming an entity not able to defend itself in that situation
3) He could have diffused the request by offering a simple 5% discount off the bill or something completely under his control.
On our way out the host asked how our visit was, I gave the host a summary of my disappointment and the host was rude and continually interrupted me to defend the manager’s position. Pathetic! The customer should at least be made to feel they are right in a situation like this. Instead this manager and host have made me feel like a complete outcast, not worthy of their time, attention or respect!
I have worked in the restaurant industry before and I would fire any staff member on the spot for any such transgression. You never ever make a customer feel like that!
I will not be visiting a Melting Pot restaurant ever again because of this. You have lost a loyal customer. In the future I suggest providing your managers and hosts with mandatory courses on how to work and communicate with both employees and guests of your establishment.
I have read many reviews online and the majority I see say good things about food, ambiance or wait staff. They also say many bad things about management or customer service. In this economic climate a business can not afford such customer-intolerance. I look forward to their eventual going out of business announcement.
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Our family consists of my wife, 3 step children, 1 child which does not live with me and myself. I have a good job and I make a decent living. My wife also works but her gross income is about 1/3rd of mine. I pay child support to my ex-wife who is pushing to have my support payments more than doubled to almost $1000 a month. I claimed a few with holdings on my taxes last year but I worried it was not enough. My wife and I set our with holdings to 0 about mid-way through the year in an effort to avoid owing taxes in 2009. Apparently that was still not enough.
I recently pulled up the turbo tax website as I do every year and put in estimations of income based off of our final paychecks for 2008 since as of the time of this writing we do not yet have our w-2 statements. According to turbo tax we owe over $8000 on top of the $20600 we have already paid in income taxes for 2008. Wow! I would say we were surprised but this is a drastic understatement. We are devastated both morally and financially. How are we going to raise that kind of cash when our budget is already razor thin?
We do not live a life of excess. We eat out once in a while out of necessity. We shop around always trying to find the best deals on groceries and other things we buy. We have some credit cards with a total balance of less than $1950 and always pay more than the minimum each month. We make too much to declare bankruptcy yet we do not make enough to pay huge bills like this in a timely manner when they surprise or blindside us. We have no savings to speak of and I constantly worry about retirement and not having enough to even pay for basic costs of living. When we retire social security will probably be non-existent according to the common opinion of pretty much everyone I talk to. So why do we pay such high taxes on income? Why do we lose 30% of the money we work hard to earn?
As I sit here late tonight writing this I have no answers, only questions. Why must the government make it so hard for me to continue working by stealing around $30 for every $100 I earn? How can we expect people to continue working when our government is fiscally devaluing the very work we do? The taxes I have already paid in 2008 average out to almost 1700 a month. This is more than the rent on our apartment or the combined vehicle payments we make each month for our 2 cars which we need in order to get to work on a regular basis. This is more than most people could stomach paying to any one debt yet I am forced to pay these taxes according to law. If I do not fork over a huge chunk of my income each month than I will be found and will be dragged off to jail or worse.
This fact scares me and it is why I pay my taxes. The mob used to make shop keepers pay for ‘protection’ and this situation feels an awful lot like that. So here I sit typing a few paragraphs that could either earn me public scrutiny or praise. I’d prefer neither, I simply want my money back.
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I’ve been reading a lot lately about hydrogen vehicles and their potential. but the interesting thing about hydrogen technology is that there are some practical obstacles to hydrogen tech that a lot of people are not aware of. A book called, ‘the hype about hydrogen’ states that there are 5 miracles that must occur:
- current fuel cell cars cost > $100,000.00 – this must drop in order for fuel cells to even be considered by the average consumer
- not enough room for hydrogen – no known material by humankind can store enough fuel on board to give the range people want
- fuel is expensive – even hydrogen from dirty fossil fuels is 2 to 3 times more expensive than gasoline
- need fueling infrastructure – we have over 180,000 gas stations in the country. We’d need at least 20,000 stations spread out across the country to even make hydrogen a realistic and convienent fuel
- hope and pray that current competing technology doesn’t get any better.
These are very realistic and compelling reasons why hydrogen is the carrot and the American people are the donkey in this scam.
15 years ago scientists where claiming that hydrogen technology is 10 to 15 years away. That time has passed, untold billions have been spent on developing basically nothing and where are we at? Well, the technology is 10 to 15 years away from being truly viable and oh by the way.. get your checkbook out.
Why not take a look at history. Over 100 years ago there were more electric cars on roads than internal combustion cars. Electric cars were clearly popular at one point and they can be again if we as a society actually stop being placated by the ‘wait and see’ mantra that has been chanted to us for the last couple years as demand has dramatically increased for alternative fuel vehicles.
I say we forget the alternative fuel and just go for no fuel at the vehicle level. Go electric. It will be compatible with everything. Use the alternative fuels to generate the electricity, it is an even more efficient and cleaner use of those fuels anyway. The technology is already in place in almost every home in America (except the Amish but they have alternative fuel vehicles anyway).
So Mr. vehicle makers (Ford, GM, etc. al), please, get busy serving the American people for once and not your own interests. The first to do so you will find great rewards.
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Why does Linux adoption on the desktop have to be so difficult? Windows users are used to wanting thing to ‘just work’. This isn’t always easy in Linux as much as I hate to admit it. Especially when dealing with drivers for hardware. You have to make sure you are buying the right device/card and it will operate with your Linux Distribution. Unfortunately, this takes a little research and more than a basic understanding of computer internals. Your basic A+ certified tech can’t do much beyond windows so it’s more than beyond your average user’s capabilities.
This leaves Linux in the hands of the technically savvy, which is possibly where it belongs. However, the net effect of this is that the technically savvy is a smaller market and the Joe SixPack user segment clearly has priority when new hardware is created such as printers and nice, shiny, new laptops that are all the colors of the rainbow.
But what the industry seems to forget is that it was the technically savvy, the ‘power users’, of the overall market that drove the desire to improve systems. An evolution in software is not something they are used to. The manufacturers like to make new graphics cards and new processors and fully expect the OS to remain the same old version it’s always been. Typically the divergence of operating systems makes hardware devices harder to create and support. However, cards are intelligent enough now to handle a lot of their own resource management and processing and should need very little from drivers these days. But in order to keep costs down the companies tend to put a lot of the grunt work back into drivers and it’s easier to work on drivers for windows than Linux.
Is there a way past this cycle of least-common-denominator computing where the worst of the masses is the most supported? I don’t know what the solution is. Whatever the solution I can imagine quite a bit of whining and moaning (lawsuits) when it starts to be put into place.
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Assuming you already have been able to hook up your blackberry to your pc to perform the OS upgrade with the desktop manager and somewhere along the line things have become totally booched.
Simply pull the battery out of your blackberry.
Connect it to the usb cable while desktop manager is running.
The blackberry will come on and you may receive a screen indicating a lack of battery in the unit. Good.
Run the Application Loader in the desktop manager and follow through the prompts to start the installation. Once the install has started put the batter back in the device.
Allow the upgrade to complete and you will have saved your blackberry from becoming a brick berry.
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Why is it that companies tend to go with vendors whose products cost much more than other less-known vendors whose products perform much better in general (stability/performance for the $/functionality/security) when all aspects are considered?
Example:
Company XYZ, inc. chooses to use products from Vendor C instead of Vendor B. The company in question already uses a lot of Vendor C’s products and Vendor C is a ‘preferred’ vendor. Vendor B is an up and comer with several solutions that out-perform all aspects of Vendor C’s identical offerings. Both Vendors are presented to the company and Vendor C is still chosen even though Vendor B is more cost-effective, their solution has triple the performance of Vendor C’s product and Vendor C’s product’s are well known to constantly need software upgrades to fix security issues that the Vendor (through shoddy coding review) allows into ‘final’ releases.
Why did Vendor C get tapped for supplying the companies needs?
The answer is multi-faceted.
Kickbacks to corporate officials or board members of the company, board members with undisclosed conflicts of interest, managers not wanting to ‘rock the boat’ with new technology decisions, a lack of truly solid technical understanding combined with almost non-existent forward thinking (ie: a solution for the now in the now even if it doesn’t meet needs in 2 years).
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