innovation

Advice to fast food restaurant execs: stop ‘innovating,’ do the basics right

By David McElroy · July 22, 2018

Dear smart people who run restaurant chains:

I hope you won’t mind me telling you how to do your jobs. I know you have many years of experience running hamburger joints and chicken chains and sandwich shops. I’m sure you’re smart folks. Honest. But I constantly have one question when I go to your restaurants.

Are you people out of your minds?

I ask that will as much respect as I can muster, because I actually want you to succeed. I don’t want to assume you’re a bunch of idiots. I don’t want to assume you want your companies to fail. I actually want you to succeed, because when you do your jobs well, I have a better experience eating out.

So will you tolerate some advice from a customer?

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If you care about education — not just schooling — please read this paper right now

By David McElroy · May 24, 2011

For years now, I’ve struggled with finding a way to adequately explain all the things that I see wrong with how we handle education and what steps we could take to fix them. I don’t have to try anymore, because anyone who’s willing to read this paper by Michael Strong will pretty much know what I would have said if I were actually qualified to talk about it — and it’s clear that Strong is both qualified and passionate to talk about it.

This paper was published almost four years ago, but I never knew about it until the author gave me the link Monday. After suffering through dozens of mediocre articles and podcasts about education over the past decade or so, I have to say that this one is going to be my new starting point to recommend to people who are willing to read 23 pages of well-written and gripping prose. And — let’s be honest — if you don’t care enough to read just 23 pages, you don’t really care that much about education.

The thing that makes this paper so worthy of your time is that it’s not just about achieving better test scores, as many modern conservatives want. It’s not just about helping students develop as human beings, as many modern liberals want. It’s about integrating information, critical thinking skills, culture and more into something that can create better lives in the real world. And it’s this sort of properly integrated person who will take the lead in building the post-statist world I’ve been talking about. So I’ll shut up — if you’ll just go read this PDF now. It’s worth it.

Change This – The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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