Amazon Has Ruined Online Delivery for Every Other Company in the World

You know how you get on a Saturday when it gets dark, it’s snowing out and, well, it’s Saturday?

As something of a hermit, I tend to get all settled in a bit earlier than normal people, so I was well settled watching one of the 8 million college football bowl games that’ll be airing over the next 10 days, when there was  knock at the door.

Now who in the heck would be here on a snowy Saturday? (Remember that hermits don’t get a lot of visitors.) It’s the FedEx guy. It’s 5:30 Saturday evening and he’s delivering the case of cat food I ordered from Amazon earlier in the week (Thursday to be exact). Ok I used a coupon and I get a ton of stuff from Amazon, so as the overseer and inheritor of three rather unsocial cats, I need cat food. Don’t judge.

Two things hit me: One, it sucks to be a FedEx guy on a Saturday when it’s snowing out and some idiot wants food for his cats and, two, Amazon has ruined home delivery for nearly every other company on earth.

With Amazon Prime, I get “free” delivery two-day delivery from Amazon. Of course nothing is free . . . Prime costs around $80 a year, and includes a few other perks, like streaming videos.

Some other companies offer free delivery on most stuff, like LL Beans, but a bunch offer not much and still, in the face of Amazon’s delivery (which is often free regardless of Prime, but not as fast). Companies like Harry and David’s offer free delivery on some items, but continues to peg delivery costs to the final price of the order. And while I understand it costs companies money to pick, pack and ship, charging the shipping and handling add-on based on the price of the goods purchased creates an apples and oranges problem for potential customers. When shipping can add 20 or 30 percent to an order, customers look elsewhere. To its credit, Harry and David’s does offer free shipping on many more items than it used to . . . so you can get those great pears without paying a shipping premium.

By offering fixed-rate shipping, many companies pass on the costs at a reasonable rate. Lucero, my favorite olive oil producer, offers flat rate shipping for $8.95, and free shipping on orders over $100. That works just fine for me.

Yep, Amazon has spoiled me, and no doubt has spoiled millions of other online shoppers as well. It has also hurt smaller businesses unable to cut huge deals with FedEx, UPS or the Postal Service and can’t afford to compete on shipping costs.

So thanks to the people who slug through the snow and the companies who keep those delivery trucks full of all kinds of goodies . . . even if it’s for unsocial cats.

The NRA Misses a Chance to Join the Mainstream

Let’s say you were the face of the National Rifle Association and had to give a press conference a few days after a massacre in a school in which 20 kids and six teachers were killed. Thought about it a minute? Ok . . . could you have possibly given speech worse or less insightful than that given by NRA Vice Executive President Wayne LaPierre?

Look, there are all kinds of arguments for owning or not owning guns, but LaPierre blew it. Given the chance to either not offer any “solutions,” or perhaps offering a token gesture about “taking a look” at gun regulations, LaPierre continued the NRA’s often paranoid stance that any change is bad change, and while understanding slippery slopes exist all over the place on these politically charged issues, LaPierre fumbled the moment.

The NRA, which has long offered a variety of gun safety courses for all types of people, has now lost that good message. The NRA is now perceived by many as a group of wild-eyed crazies ranting about government confiscation of guns, a group advocating stock piling weapons for self-defense and the protection of our children, a group urging everyone to pack a pistol “just in case.” And on and on.

LaPierre to me sounded like a man completely closed to any sound but his. No discussion is needed for LaPierre because he can’t hear. By waving the flag over the 2^nd amendment, the NRA continually brings the NRA base into the fold by feeding the paranoia that the government is coming for your guns, that unless you carry a weapon bad things could happen to you, or that the only way to stop school massacres is to make sure a cop is in each and every school .

Lapierre had a chance to say, “I look forward to talking to legislators about meaningful gun controls.” He didn’t say anything like that, and he has continued to say that any restrictions won’t work and are merely an effort to take away every American’s patriotic right to own a gun.

The one thing Lapierre has gotten right is that the information about certain guns, notably assault rifles, is often wrong. They’re not automatic weapons or machine guns, they are not military weapons, they do not fire higher power bullets than other weapons (the .223 Bushmaster used in the Sandy Hook shooting is a visual copy of a military rifle, but is a semi-automatic weapon and its ammo, though thought to be among the widest used rifle caliber in the U.S. is largely used as a target round and is considered an unsuitable caliber for anything other than “varmit” hunting, though it has obviously been used with devastating  effect otherwise).

But besides blaming everyone from the media to video games for this violence, Lapierre declines to even hint that guns themselves are part of the issue. It sounds good to say the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun. Sure that might work, but let’s also think that it might not . . . There were two armed guards (off-duty cops) at Columbine, both of which shot at one of the shooters, and there were armed security officers on the Virginia Tech campus.

Even well trained good guys don’t necessarily hit everything at which they shoot. Bullets miss, they fragment and they go through doors and walls. I’m thinking those aren’t good things, no matter how “good a guy” is when he’s shooting at a bad guy, who probably isn’t standing still and is shooting back and may be mixed into a crowd. One merely needs to look at records of police shootings . . . number of shots fired, missed etc. . . . to see that not everything aimed at gets hit. So now imagine an armed security guard trying to bring down a shooter running down a hallway lined with kid-filled classrooms. It all sounds great until a guard shoots a teacher. No offense, but these aren’t highly trained combat Delta Force guys.

All kinds of politically driven rhetoric will be flying through the air on this one. The questions remains: Are there reasonable legislative steps that might be taken to reduce (or possibly reduce) misuse of guns?

Close the gun-buying  loopholes, make sure the “can’t buy” lists include everyone who should be either mentally or legally (felons etc.) disqualified. Develop a rapid background check system. Limit extended round ammo clips. Enforce current laws. While our awareness, as well as policies and procedures, have changed dramatically since the Columbine shooting, clearly something more needs to be done. (Mental  health concerns have again popped up after Sandy Hook. The failures at Columbine, including the failure of law enforcement to pursue reported warnings about the shooters as well as to act on specific threats about one of the shooters (including carrying out a search warrant) raised the debate, but Sandy Hook should raise it again on multiple levels.

It’s a start, and the discussion needs to begin. Not on high-flying patriotic issues, but embracing practical and reasonable laws that have a chance of lowering gun violence and serve to preserve the rights of lawful gun owners. The NRA is on the wrong side of the wave, embracing its most radical members. The discussion will go on without them.

ESPN's Parker Digs a Deep Racist Pit for Himself

ESPN’s Rob Parker’s rant about the “blackness” of Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III was a disgusting, racist rant about something that may be a seldom outwardly spoken issue, but, frankly, one that I find appalling.

By questioning the rookie quarterback’s “blackness” Parker threw himself into the pit of racist rants everywhere . . . white or black. Can you imagine some white guy saying a bunch of other white guys aren’t “white” enough? Holy crap. The guy would be shredded in the press. He’d be encouraging white people to ignore everything else around them and act “whiter,” I suppose by throwing aside other cultural influences and only embracing that white is “white.” Maybe unbleached flour, segregation, white-only restaurants, ambrosia?

Who knows? Parker, of course, doesn’t get the fast and furious reaction to his comments, including, one supposes, his suspension by ESPN. He called his critics “uneducated” and “silly.”

"Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?" Parker asked.

"He's not real. OK, he's black, he kind of does the thing, but he's not really down with the cause. He's not one of us. He's kind of black, but he's not really, like, the guy you want to hang out with because he's off to something else.

"We all know he has a white fiancée. There was all this talk about how he's a Republican ... Tiger Woods was like, 'I've got black skin, but don't call me black.'"

Wow. Unbelieveable. So now Griffin III isn’t only not black enough but, oh my God, he’s going to marry a white girl. So Parker, digging his racist butt even deeper, is against interracial marriage. Damn. T really can’t get any worse. Again, reverse the people talking, change their races in your head and imagine the same words. (“Sure he’s white, but he’s not white enough. After all, he’s marrying some black girl.”) Just appalling.

Why aren’t we past the point where we are supposed to live up to someone else’s narrow expectations for us? So not black enough . . . what’s next? Not gay enough? Not woman enough? Not man enough? Parker took a tumble down a path that makes my blood boil. I hope he stays in that pit he dug for himself. ESPN needs to cut the cord permanently. 

Let's Try to Find Some Middle Ground in the Gun Control Debate

A football player’s apparent murder/suicide in Kansas City has once again thrust guns and gun controls back into the spotlight.

And just as quickly, gun opponents and gun advocates jumped on the bandwagon. Bob Costas called for more controls of guns during Sunday night’s football game, and faded rocker Ted Nuggent called Costas a dope and “only fools blame the tools.” Unfortunately, two people are dead, for whatever reason, and Costas was right in saying they might not be if there wasn’t a gun lying around. The tragedy is that a 3-month-old kid now has no parents.

Look, I don’t want to take your guns, just make some regulations a touch more reasonable before you buy them. And while guns will be used by people in bad ways, it seems to me a few sensible regulations might limit that.

While the press frequently confuses the “automatic” vs. “semi-automatic” issue (automatic, hold the trigger and the weapon keeps firing . . . semi-automatic and each trigger pull fires the weapon), legal automatic weapons are not really the issue . . . you need a federal license to get one, and you ain’t gonna be able to get that.

So the issue generally falls to gun shops and gun shows, and to sensible laws that allow people to buy guns, but perhaps eliminates some of the fringe ammunition and gun designs.

Four ideas:

Limit magazine capacity. There no reason for a person to carry a weapon that boasts a 100-plus round magazine. Ok, it may be cool, but there’s no real-world reason for it. Buy two smaller clips, you cheap bastard.

Eliminate large ammunition purchases. Do you really need 10,000 rounds of ammo?

Eliminate body-armor-piercing bullets. Seems simple and logical, but it’s something the National Rifle Association has fought. Special hardened metal alloys were initially designed for police use to increase penetration of cars and windshields etc. since regular lead tend to deflect and fragment (note the people injured by police bullets in a recent New York City shooting). This ammo shouldn’t be available to civilians. Why on earth would anyone need ammo like this unless it’s to kill cops?

Mandate background checks at shops and gun shows. The gaps here are gun shows, where background checks are often not run. It takes but a few minutes, so why not? Make it a federal regulation. Cops run a check when they pull you over, or you go to get a driver’s license. Why should buying a gun be any different?

We can argue the Constitutional right (or not) to own guns until the cows come home and everyone will continue to agree to disagree. But limiting some types of guns or accessories has little to do with the Constitution  . . .

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said there’s a constitutional right to buy high-capacity clips and magazines. Others have made the same arguments. “You simply can't keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals who want to do harm. And when you try and do it, you restrict our freedom," he argued recently on Fox News.

I’ll argue that freedom does not depend on 100-round magazines. I’ll also argue that at the time the Constitution was written, guns were a single-shot thing . . . reload . . . maybe four shots a minute.

Politicians of all types cringe when the NRA starts barking. But some polls have shown that that bark may actually be less than the ultimate bite. Hunters and other gun owners have said that some additional controls make sense. And many are starting to walk away from the NRA’s extreme positions. There should be common ground once each side stops yelling at each other.

In an excellent New York Times op-ed piece (April 2012 “I Hunt, but the N.R.A. Isn’t for me), Lily Raff McCaulou notes that while the NRA boasts 4 million members, some 90 percent of gun owners aren’t members. And as a gun owner and sportswoman, she owns guns, but argues against many of the NRA’s political positions and posturing.

There will always be sick and demented people who may wind up killing people, but let’s tighten a few of the loopholes a touch and make sure we make people, even good ones, responsible for their actions and their gun purchases. It shouldn’t be easier to get a gun than get a driver’s license.