McDonalds Security Guard

A couple of weeks ago I was at the McDonalds in Winnetka ordering some Chicken Nuggets. As I ate my bland but filling nuggets, I looked around to see an intimidating security guard standing by the door. He continued to change his post about every ten minutes, from one side of the restaurant to the other. He was wearing all black, and looked rather serious. The scene was incomprehensible; why was a scary-looking security guard on duty at a McDonalds in one of the richest towns in America? I haven't heard of a single public violent incident happening there in my lifetime, and they have a security guard at the main thoroughfare for New Trier teens and busy parents.

One quick search of "arrests in McDonalds" brings up pages upon pages of cases involving police at McDonalds. The rate of crime at McDonalds restaurants could be attributed to the people it caters to. McDonalds offers incredibly cheap and convenient food, even if it isn't the best for your health. While this could appeal to upper-class people who need a quick meal on the way to work, lower class people tend to use McDonalds as a primary food source. In less affluent populations, crime is almost always more frequent. Instead of having security guards at McDonalds in more urban and poorer communities, we have one in a town with a ridiculously low crime rate.

So why do we have a security guard? My guess is that, although however unnecessary, the security guard makes higher class people feel safe in the fast food restaurant environment, which many people aren't used to in this part of the country, since the zining laws make it near impossible to build fast food restaurants.

Do you think the security guard at McDonald's is necessary? Should fast food chains in less affluent areas have access to these sorts of securities?

Power Grab

I came across an interesting term in my copyright research. A Patent Troll is a person or company who enforces its patents in seemingly ridiculous ways. Before I get to the implications of patent trolling, here are some examples of  Patent Trolls:

Warner Brothers requested a takedown of the imdb page for their movie Wrath of the Titans. The one page that had all of the official information for the actors, helpers, and facts of the movie was requested to be taken down by Warner Brothers. imdb is used by millions a day, so wouldn't this page actually help advertise WoT? Not to mention that the imdb page wasn't really infringing on any copyright laws.

The RIAA asked Google to take the entire electro-pop section of Last.fm out of its search pages, because it might have contained a pirated copy of an album.


These examples show that copyright laws aren't working as they were originally intended. Instead of protecting artists, large companies are flexing their muscles by requesting takedowns of millions of websites a month. 
Google has to then filter through all of these requests, which takes time and resources, and after all is said and done, the allegedly infringing websites are still up and running.


How would you fix the copyright laws so that these sorts of ridiculous claims wouldn't happen?

Standing on The Shoulders of Giants

I didn't make up the phrase in the title. I took that from Isaac Newton's quote:  

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants."

Newton himself took this quote from Bernard of Chartes who stated:
"We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size."

How did I learn all of this? I took it directly from a Youtube video  called "Everything is a Remix".

 

I found this video while searching for an answer to a question that came up in my Junior Theme: Do artists and thinkers deserve copyright protection? In one of the best mini-documentaries I've ever seen, Youtuber Kirby1 dissects various aspects of our world to show that nothing can be created out of thin air. All new ideas are just tiny flowers, with massive intertwining roots that reach to the beginning of time. These flowers will become roots themselves in the future. 

Many people believe that ideas should receive protection from others, but who is protecting the ideas that were sampled in the first place? Should George Lucas have consulted Akira Kurosawa before borrowing heavily from his films in "Star Wars"? Given the borrowing nature of people and ideas, should copyright even exist? I urge you all to watch this fascinating video.