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orbemnews · 3 years

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The Small Business Administration’s Gaffes Are Now Her Job to Fix Isabella Casillas Guzman, President Biden’s choice to run the Small Business Administration, inherited a portfolio of nearly $1 trillion in emergency aid and an agency plagued by controversy when she took over in March. She has been sprinting from crisis to crisis ever since. Some new programs have been mired in delays and glitches, while the S.B.A.’s best-known pandemic relief effort, the Paycheck Protection Program, nearly ran out of money for its loans this month, confusing lenders and stranding millions of borrowers. Angry business owners have deluged the agency with criticism and complaints. Now, it’s Ms. Guzman’s job to turn the ship around. “It’s the largest S.B.A. portfolio we’ve ever had, and clearly there’s going to need to be some changes in how we do business,” she said in a recent interview. When the coronavirus crisis struck and the economy went into a free fall last year, Congress and the Trump administration pushed the Small Business Administration to the forefront, putting it in charge of huge sums of relief money and complicated new programs. It is by far the smallest cabinet-level agency, with an annual operating budget that is typically less than half of what the Defense Department spends in a day. It was long viewed within the government as a sleepy backwater. But when the pandemic sent unemployment claims soaring, Congress responded with an unprecedented plan: Give businesses money to keep their workers employed. Just seven days after President Donald J. Trump signed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in late March 2020, the Small Business Administration began accepting applications for the Paycheck Protection Program. Agency employees describe a blurry month of round-the-clock work to manage the program’s launch and early days. The agency’s 68 district offices, which normally field a few hundred inquiries a week, received 12,000 phone calls a day from desperate business owners. A rotating group of a dozen people camped in an ad hoc war room at the mostly empty headquarters to write the program’s rules and revamp technology systems to handle the onslaught of applications. Despite lots of speed bumps — including confusing, often-revised loan terms and several technical meltdowns — the program enjoyed some success. Millions of business owners credit it with helping them survive the pandemic and keep more workers employed. Economists are skeptical about whether the program’s results justify its huge cost, but Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden both embraced the effort as a centerpiece of their economic rescue plans. As the pandemic stretched on and the economy plunged into a recession, the Paycheck Protection Program morphed into the largest business bailout in American history. More than eight million companies got forgivable loans, totaling $788 billion — nearly as much money as the government spent on its three rounds of direct payments to taxpayers. But there were pitfalls, some of which will take years to unravel. Fraud is a major concern. Thousands of people took advantage of the rushed program’s minimal documentation requirements and sought illicit loans, according to prosecutors, to fund gambling sprees, Lamborghinis, luxury watches, an alpaca farm and a Medicare fraud scheme. The Justice Department has charged hundreds of people with stealing more than $440 million, and scores of federal investigations are active. (During her confirmation hearing, Ms. Guzman promised that she would “prioritize the reduction of fraud, waste and abuse.”) There were other problems. Female and minority business owners were disproportionately left out of the relief effort. A last-minute attempt by Mr. Biden to make the program more generous for solo business owners came too late to help many of them. This month, a new emergency popped up: The program ran short of money and abruptly closed to most new applicants. “There was no warning,” Toby Scammell, the chief executive of Womply, a company that helps borrowers get loans, said of the latest debacle. His company alone has more than 1.6 million applicants caught in limbo. The Paycheck Protection Program is far from the agency’s only challenge. It’s also managing a complex and evolving system of low-interest disaster loans of up to $500,000 and new grant funds, created by Congress, for two of the hardest-hit industries: the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant for live-event businesses and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. (The hotel industry is pushing for its own version.) Today in Business Updated May 25, 2021, 2:46 p.m. ET Each required the agency to create policies and technology systems from scratch. The venue program has been especially rocky. On its scheduled start day, in early April, the application system completely failed, leaving desperate applicants hitting refresh and relying on social media posts for information and updates. “I turned to my associate director and said, ‘I figured something like this would happen,’” said Chris Zacher, the executive director of Levitt Pavilion, a nonprofit performing arts center in Denver. The Small Business Administration revived the system three weeks later and has received 12,200 applications, but it does not anticipate awarding grants until late May. People lower in the tiered priority queue, including Mr. Zacher, fear that even if their claim is approved, they won’t see a check until June or July — a major hurdle for venues trying to plan their summer and fall seasons. “It’s maddening,” Mr. Zacher said. “A program that’s supposed to help save indie venues is putting us at a disadvantage because of all these delays.” Ms. Guzman, 51, hears those criticisms relentlessly — the response threads to her agency’s social media posts have turned into primal screams of pain. (“I SERIOUSLY CANNOT TAKE THIS WITH SBA ANY LONGER” is one of the milder replies.) She said she understood the urgency. “It’s definitely unprecedented — across the board, across the nation — and we are seeing multiple disasters at the same time,” she said. “The agency is highly focused on just still responding to disaster and implementing this relief as quickly as possible.” This is Ms. Guzman’s second tour at the Small Business Administration. When President Barack Obama picked Maria Contreras-Sweet in 2014 to take over the agency, Ms. Guzman went along as a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff. The women had met in the mid-1990s. Ms. Guzman, a California native with an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, was hired at 7Up/RC Bottling by Ms. Contreras-Sweet, an executive there. “I was always impressed with her ability to handle jobs with steep learning curves — she has a quick grasp of complex concepts,” Ms. Contreras-Sweet said. Ms. Guzman spent her first stint at the agency focused on traditional projects like its flagship lending program, which normally facilitates around $28 billion a year in loans. This time, the job is radically different. “We’re working closely to identify opportunities to build up a strong agency to meet this demand of scale,” she said. “The S.B.A. needs to be as entrepreneurial as the small businesses we serve. What I really, truly mean by that is that a more customer-first approach.” The agency is testing a new “community navigators” program, which will fund local organizations, including nonprofits and government groups, to work closely with businesses owned by people with disabilities or in underserved rural, minority and immigrant communities. It’s an expansion of a grass-roots effort by several nonprofits to get vulnerable businesses access to Paycheck Protection Program loans. Ms. Guzman said she was bullish about that effort and other agency priorities, like expanding Black and other minority entrepreneurs’ access to capital — but first, like the clients it serves, the Small Business Administration has to weather the pandemic. And to do that, it has to stop shooting itself in the foot. The much-awaited second attempt at opening the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant fund was preceded by one final debacle: The agency announced — and then, less than a day before the date, abandoned — a plan to open the first-come-first-served fund on a Saturday. For those seeking aid that has not yet arrived, the incident felt like yet another kick in the teeth. Ms. Guzman said she was aware of the need for her agency to overcome its limitations and rebuild its checkered reputation. “This is a pivotal moment in time where we can leverage the interest in small business to really deliver a remarkable agency to them,” she said. “I value being the voice for the 30 million small and innovative start-ups around the country. What I always say to my staff is that I want these businesses to feel like the giants that they are in our economy.” Source link Orbem News #Administrations #Business #Fix #Gaffes #Job #Small

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isoscelesfriction · 7 years

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The Los Angeles Conundrum // Mike Davis’s “City of Quartz”

Photo by @gerrymaravilla

After hearing and reading about it for over a decade, I finally decided to pick up City of Quartz -- the fascinating and sprawling examination of Los Angeles by historian and urban theorist Mike Davis.

As a Los Angeles native and current resident, I couldn’t turn away from Davis’s seemingly revelatory discoveries and criticisms of the city I call home.

Below are my favorite passages.

"It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bod, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living” -- Job Harriman, 1911

...it is all too easy to envision Los Angeles reproducing itself endlessly across the desert with assistance of pilfered water, cheap immigrant labor, Asian capital and desperate homebuyers willing to trade lifetimes on the freeway in exchange for $500,000 ‘dream homes’ in the middle of Death Valley.

We talked about the weather for a while, when I asked them what they thought about Los Angeles, a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua and the May Pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite. They had watched it in Sal Salvador, in endless dubbed reruns of I Love Lucy and Starsky and Hutch, a city where everyone was young and rich and drove new cards and saw themselves on television. After ten thousand daydreams like this, he had deserted the Salvadorean Army and hitchhiked two thousand and five hundred miles to to Tijuana. A year later he was standing at the corner of Alvarado and Seventh Streets in the MacArthur Park district near Downtown Los Angeles, along with all the rest of yearning, hard working Central America. No one like him was rich or drove a new car - except for the coke dealers - and the police were as mean as back home. More importantly no one like him was on television; they were all invisible.

Los Angeles (and its alter-ego, Hollywood) becomes the literalized Mahagonny: city of seduction and defeat, the antipode of critical intelligence.

...noir has nonetheless remained the popular, and despite its intended elitism, ‘populist’ anti-myth of Los Angeles.

“Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn...endeavoring to eat up this rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any urban character to impact. On the other hand, the place has retained the manners, culture, and general look of a huge country village.” -- Morrow Mayo

Los Angeles understands its past, instead, through a robust fiction called noir.

“From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, in spite of all of the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place - full of odd, dying people, who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America - full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religious cults and fake science, and wild cat enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profit, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people . . . a jungle.” -- Louis Adamic

“You can rot here without feelings it.” -- John Rechy

Sociologically, 1940s noir was more typically concerned with gangster underclasses and official corruption than with the pathology of the middle class.

The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a superstition of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest.

Indeed for a while the more famous of the exiles could fancy themselves Hollywood sahibs: happy white people under the palm trees, feeding themselves on an economy run by invisible servants.

‘in which the city is at once an endless text always promising meaning but ultimately only offering hints and signs of a possible and final reality . . . like a “printed circuit” - or a freeway.’ -- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

They have become so integrally involved in the organizations of high culture, not because of old-fashioned philanthropy, but because ‘culture’ has become an important component of the land development process, as well as a crucial moment in the competition between elites and regional centers.

... a ‘sympathetic ecology for architecture’ and excoriated the elitism of critics who failed to consult the actual desires o the masses.

...L.A. artists are in a desperate state, fighting over scraps, without career opportunities, funds or housing’.

As a result Black and Chicano cultural avant gardes have either been decimated or forced to retreat from their community constituencies of the co-optative shelter of the universities and corporate arts establishment.

...while the Mission Revivalism of Lummis’s generation relied upon a fictional past, the World City hoopla of today thrives upon a fictional future.

The city is a place where everything is possible, nothing is safe and durable enough to believe in, where constant synchronicity prevails, and the automatic ingenuity of capital ceaselessly throw up new forms and spectacles

...Régis Debray once put it, ‘revolutions revolutionize counter-revolutions’

...land development is still Souther California’s most lucrative large industry with annual profits as high as 50 percent

...conservative, pro-developer majorities control the boards of supervisors in every Southern California county except Santa Barbara.

The Times’s dilemma, in other words, almost precisely outlines the problem of ruling-class hegemony in a postmodern city of secessionist suburbs and burgeoning barrios.

Like Downtown, Hollywood is becoming a colony of the world economy.

‘Community’ in Los Angeles means homogeneity of race, class and, especially, home values.

The master discourse here - exemplified by the West Hills secessionists - is homestead exclusivism, whether the immediate issues is apartment construction, commercial encroachment, school busing, crime, taxes or simply community designation.

Slow growth, in other words, is about homeowner control of land use and much more.

The starting point is to reconstruct the white-supremacist genealogy of its essential infrastructure: the homeowners’ association.

Some homeowners’ associations are entirely voluntary coalescences of perceived common interest; many others are mandatory enrollments (pre organized by developers) of all residents of a track or planned unit development.

...overriding purpose was to ensure social and racial homogeneity.

‘The reasons for creating of moving to a . . . minimal city was not to signal something unique about one’s demand for public goods, but to insulate one’s property from the burden of supporting public services.

...a hypocritical attempt by the rich to use ecology to detour Vietnam-era growth around their luxury enclaves.

“Those immortal ballads, Home Sweet Home, My Old Kentucky Home, and The Little Gray Home in the West, were not written about apartments . . . they never sang songs about a pile of receipts.” -- Herbert Hoover

...’homeowner opposition to multi-family construction,’ steming from mobilizations of the early 1970s, that has constrained the supply of land for multi-family housing.

Cal Trans engineers have warned that without a quick fix of mass transit, ‘the system isn’t going to break down, it’s going to explode’.

As Silver explained, ‘people don’t organize to fight for something, but they organize to fight against something’.

It is no surprising that poor people, especially renters, will choose jobs over environmental quality when the two are artificially counterposed.

The ‘Second Civil War’ that began in the hot summers of the 1960s been institutionalize into the very structure of urban space. The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by a rhetoric of social warfare that calculates the interests of the urban poor and the middle class as a zero-sum game.

Yet white middle class imagination, absent from any first hand knowledge of inner city conditions, magnifies the perceived threat through a demonological lens.

Although architectural critics are usually oblivious to how the built environment contributes to segregation, pariah groups - whether poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females -- read the meaning immediately.

...and the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation.

...public architecture is America is literally being turned inside out, in the service of ‘security’ and profit.

Moreover, with the post-liberal shift of government expenditure from welfare to repression, carceral structures have become the new frontier of public architecture.

‘Can you imagine the mind fuck of being locked up in a Holiday Inn?’ -- Inmate at DTLA prison

But as long as the actual violence was more or less contained to the ghetto, the gang wars were also a voyeuristic titillation to white suburbanites devouring lurid imagery in their newspapers or on television.

In 1982, for example, following a rash of LAPD ‘chokehold’ killings of young Black men in custody, [Chief Gates] advanced the extraordinary theory that the deaths were the fault of the victims’ racial anatomy, not excessive police force: ‘We may be finding that in some Blacks when [the cartoid chokehold] is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do normal [sic] people.’

He was alleged to be reaching suspiciously into his pants; more importantly, he was a ‘suspected gang member’ - a category that now seemed to justify abuse or even execution.

...it seems probable that the first generation of Black street gangs emerged as a defensive response to white violence in the schools and streets during the 1940s.

...it is not surprising that Parker’s LAPD looked upon the ‘rehabilitation’ of gang youth in much the same was as the arms industry regarded peace-mongering or disarmament treaties.

But too often Crippin’ came to represent an escalation of intra-ghetto violence to Clockwork Orange levels (murder as status symbol, and so on) that was unknown in the days of the Slausons and anathema to everything that the Panthers had stood for.

At a time when economic opportunity was draining away from Southcentral Los Angeles, the Crips were becoming the power resource of last resort for thousands of abandoned youth.

“Gangs are never goin’ to die out. You all goin’ to get us jobs” -- 16-year old Grape Street Crip

Although terrorism is always portrayed precisely as inarticulate male-violence, authorities expend enormous energy to protect us from its ‘ravings’, even at the cost of censorship and restriction of free speech.

‘the fighting mood of the 1960s has been replaced by a sick apathy or angry frustration’.

As the Los Angeles economy in the 1970s was ‘unplugged’ from the American industrial heartland and rewired to East Asia, the non-Anglo workers have borne the brunt of adaptation and sacrifice.

The Latino Eastside gangs, by contrast, are still trying to catch up. Dealing largely in homegrown drugs, like PCP, amphetamines and marijuana, with relatively low turnover values in a market consisting almost entirely of other poor teenagers, they are unable to accumulate the fineries or weaponry of the Crips. They have yet to effectively join the world market.

“Left to themselves and the principles of Adam Smith, the cosortia of Medellin investors would no more see themselves as criminals than did the Dutch or English venturers into the Indies trade (including opium), who organized their speculative cargoes in much the same way . . . the trade rightly resents being called a mafia. . . It is basically an ordinary business that has been criminalized - as Colombians see it - by a U.S. which cannot manage it’s own affairs.” -- Eric Hobsbawm

While their parents may still measure the quality of life by old-country standards, the iron rations of Tijuana or Ciudad Guatemala, their children’s self-image is shaped by the incessant stimuli of L.A. consumer culture.

...the church unavoidably assumed a central role in Latinos’ search for power.

The real issue remained empowerment versus paternalism.

#Mike Davis #City of Quartz #Los Angeles #California #Quote #Quotes #Reading Log

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newstechreviews · 5 years

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Nine students have died at the University of Southern California (USC) this semester, causing alarm on campus and leading students to demand more mental health resources. Now, USC officials say they will open a new psychiatric clinic on Monday.

Dr. Steven Siegel, chairman of the USC psychiatry department, tells TIME the project has been in the works for a few years, and wasn’t in response to the student deaths. “It turns out that all of this attention is on USC this week, and the clinic is opening, but that timeline is not related,” he said Friday.

It comes as students say they have long had trouble accessing mental health care at one of the wealthiest universities in the country, where tuition tops $57,000 and the endowment was $5.5 billion as of June 2018. Three students died by suicide this semester, the school said, and the causes of some of the other deaths have not been publicly confirmed.

Schools across the country have struggled to meet an unprecedented student demand for mental health services on campus, as rates of anxiety and depression among college students have continued to increase in recent years. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of students visiting campus counseling centers increased by about 30% on average, while college enrollment grew by less than 6%, the Center for Collegiate Mental Health found in a 2015 report.

Some universities have opened up satellite counseling clinics above a local Starbucks or in the athletic department to reach more students. Some have allocated more money to counseling services and hired more therapists. Others have rolled out a counseling mobile app or a free online screening for depression.

USC students gathered at a mental health forum on Wednesday night, calling for more mental health counselors, more transparency from the university and more understanding from professors.

USC senior Claire Redlaczyk, 21, attended the forum and talked about the challenge of accessing therapy after her father died in February of her freshman year. That semester, Redlaczyk says she met with a therapist in the university’s counseling center during eight one-hour sessions that she found helpful as she struggled with grief. When she tried to continue the counseling the following school year, “still grieving very heavily,” staff told her that the center couldn’t offer her any more therapy sessions and directed her to a grief support group.

“That was something I really wanted as a sophomore. I remember I was on the phone with the counseling center just crying and begging them to take me, and they were just like, ‘You can go off-campus.’ I was devastated,” Redlaczyk says. “It’s just not very feasible for me to go to therapy off campus. It’s expensive. I don’t have a car. It’s far away, so I just ended up not continuing any therapy after that.”

In a letter to the USC community on Saturday, university officials called the recent student deaths “devastating and heartbreaking” and sought to dispel rumors about how many students had died by suicide. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. And tight-knit communities, including college campuses, can sometimes experience suicide contagion, a phenomenon in which exposure to suicide can result in suicidal behavior in others.

“People are searching for answers and information as we attempt to make sense of these terrible losses. There is a great deal of speculation about the causes of these deaths and most are being attributed to suicide. This is not correct,” they said in the letter. “These tragic losses have resulted from a number of different causes. In some cases the cause of death is still undetermined, and in others the loved ones do not want details disclosed.”

USC President Carol Folt told The Los Angeles Times that police are now investigating drug overdoses as a potential cause of some of the deaths. The Times also reported that investigators are exploring whether tainted drugs played a role, though that has not been confirmed as a cause of death, and many autopsies and toxicology reports are still pending. In a video interview with Annenberg Media on Monday, USC’s Chief Health Officer Sarah Van Orman said there are between four and 15 student deaths in a typical academic year.

But the fact that even three of the deaths have been suicides has led students to call for better preventative mental health services.

“We will do more. We’re doing more,” Siegel says. “But we’re not super humans. We don’t read minds. We’re not ever-present, omnipotent forces that can promise you we’re going to stop bad things from happening.”

USC junior Maxwell Pickenpaugh, who uses they/them pronouns, says they would like USC officials to be more transparent about student tragedy and the challenge of addressing mental health on campus. “A lot of us feel really upset with the whole situation,” Pickenpaugh says.

Pickenpaugh, 21, says they have struggled to receive mental health care at USC after being treated for bipolar disorder in high school. When Pickenpaugh contacted the USC counseling center during their freshman year, they say they were told that bipolar disorder was “too long-term of an illness to be treated at USC health center.” Pickenpaugh met with a USC counselor to get recommendations for off-campus care, but it took a month to get that appointment. The USC counselor recommended and helped Pickenpaugh reach out to a handful of outside mental health clinics and therapists, but then never followed up to check in, Pickenpaugh says. And none of the off-campus therapists ever responded.

“I felt really discouraged, and absolutely like, ‘OK, USC just does not care about my mental health.’ It was really hard,” Pickenpaugh says. “I just continued to struggle by myself for a while, really leaning on my family and my friends to help me through it.”

Pickenpaugh says it took nearly two years to find a therapist who would accept their health insurance and charge prices they could afford.

USC’s new psychiatry clinic is aimed at helping students like Pickenpaugh, who had not previously heard about the initiative, but thinks it’s a step in the right direction. “We recognize that the real barrier we have is getting people into longer-term care after they’ve seen student health,” Siegel says.

“The counseling system here and elsewhere is not built or intended—at any college—to be the entire mental health system for the population. It’s a piece of the mental health system. And so what those students are hearing is, ‘We’ve done the part that we think is best done here. We think you need more than that, and so now we need to move you to an environment that can provide the kind of ‘more’ that you need.’”

Siegel says the new clinic will be able to serve 2,500 students annually — which would cut in half the number of off-campus referrals counselors need to make.

He says the university is doing what it can to address its own “microcosm” of a national problem with insufficient access to mental health care. But many students see it as a problem of misplaced priorities.

“What I’ve discovered is that USC puts so much money into so many things that are for image,” says Sabine Bajakian, 22, who graduated in May from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where two of the students who died were enrolled.

“But they won’t really do anything for the counseling center. I don’t know where my tuition is going really,” she says, referencing a $700 million residential and retail complex the university opened in 2017. “Why aren’t there enough counselors?”

The student health center currently has 46 therapists and three psychiatrists on staff, Siegel says.

He and a university spokesperson declined to say how much money the university spent to build and staff the new psychiatry clinic. But by the time it is fully staffed next summer, it will have an additional six psychiatrists and 12 therapists—a step toward providing better mental health care to more of the nearly 50,000 students on USC’s campus.

“With how high our tuition is,” Redlaczyk says, “any student should be able to see a therapist.”

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

#Blogger

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itsfinancethings · 5 years

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November 15, 2019 at 08:26PM

USC students gathered at a mental health forum on Wednesday night, calling for more mental health counselors, more transparency from the university and more understanding from professors.

But the fact that even three of the deaths have been suicides has led students to call for better preventative mental health services.

Pickenpaugh says it took nearly two years to find a therapist who would accept their health insurance and charge prices they could afford.

Siegel says the new clinic will be able to serve 2,500 students annually — which would cut in half the number of off-campus referrals counselors need to make.

The student health center currently has 46 therapists and three psychiatrists on staff, Siegel says.

“With how high our tuition is,” Redlaczyk says, “any student should be able to see a therapist.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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marymosley · 6 years

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Spooky Torts: The 2018 List Of Halloween Litigation Horrors

Here is our annual list of Halloween torts and crimes. Halloween of course remains a holiday seemingly designed for personal injury lawyers around the world and this year’s additions show why. Halloween has everything for a torts-filled holiday: battery, trespass, defamation, nuisance, product liability and more. This year’s addition is a real dozzy.

So, with no further ado, here is this year’s updated list of actual cases related to Halloween.

This year’s notable Halloween accident occurred in Madison, Tennessee at the Nashville Nightmare Haunted House. James “Jay” Yochim and three of his pals went to the attraction composed of four separate haunted houses, an escape room, carnival games and food vendors. In the attraction, people are chased by characters with chainsaws and other weapons. They were not surprised therefore when a man believed to be an employee in a Halloween costume handed Tawnya Greenfield a knife and told her to stab Yochim. She did and thought it was all pretend until blood started to pour from Yochim’s arm. The knife was real and the man was heard apologizing “I didn’t know my knife was that sharp.”

It is not clear how even stabbing with a dull knife would be considered safe.

The attraction issued a statement:

“As we have continued to review the information, we believe that an employee was involved in some way, and he has been placed on leave until we can determine his involvement. We are going over all of our safety protocols with all of our staff again, as the safety and security of all of our patrons is always our main concern. We have not been contacted by the police, but we will cooperate fully with any official investigation.”

The next scary moment is likely to be in the form of a torts complaint. Negligence against the company under respondeat superior is an obvious start. There is also a novel battery charge where he could claim that he was stabbed by trickery or deceit of a third person. There are also premises liability issues for invitees. As for Greenfield, she claims to have lacked consent due to a misrepresentation. She could be charged with negligence or a recklessness-based theory of battery, though that seems less likely.

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Last year, a 21-year-old man surnamed Cheung was killed by a moving coffin in a haunted house in Hong Kong’s Ocean Park. The attraction is called “Buried Alive” and involves hopping into coffins for a downward slide into a dark and scary space. The ride promises to provide people with the “experience being buried alive alone, before fighting their way out of their dark and eerie grave.” Cheung took a wrong turn and went backstage — only to be hit by one of the metal coffins. The hit in the head killed Cheung who was found later in the haunted house.

While there is no word of a tort lawsuit (and tort actions are rarer in Hong Kong), the case is typical of Halloween torts involving haunted houses. The decor often emphasizes spooky and dark environs which both encourage terror and torts among the participants. In this case, an obvious claim could be made that it is is negligence to allow such easy access to the operational area of the coffin ride — particularly in a dark space. As a business invitee, Cheung would have a strong case in the United States.

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A previous addition to the Spooky torts was the odd case of Assistant Prosecutor Chris White. White clearly does not like spiders, even fake ones. That much was clear given his response to finding fake spiders scattered around the West Virginia office for Halloween. White pulled a gun and threatened to shoot the fake spiders, explaining that he is “deathly afraid of spiders.” It appears that his arachnophobia (fear of spiders) was not matched by a hoplophobia (fear of firearms).

The other employees were reportedly shaken up and Logan County Prosecuting Attorney John Bennett later suspended White. Bennett said “He said they had spiders everyplace and he said he told them it wasn’t funny, and he couldn’t stand them, and he did indeed get a gun out. It had no clip in it, of course they wouldn’t know that, I wouldn’t either if I looked at it, to tell you the truth.” It is not clear how White thought threatening the decorative spiders would keep them at bay or whether he was trying to deter those who sought to deck out the office in a Halloween theme. He was not charged by his colleagues with a crime but was suspended for his conduct.

This is not our first interaction with White. He was the prosecutor in the controversial (and in my view groundless) prosecution of Jared Marcum, who was arrested after wearing a NRA tee shirt to school.

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Another new case from the last year involves a murder. Donnie Cochenour Jr., 27, got a seasonal break (at least temporarily) on detecting his alleged murder of Rebecca J. Cade, 31. Cade’s body was left hanging on a fence and was mistaken by neighbors as a Halloween decoration. The “decoration” was found by a man walking his dog and reported by construction workers. A large rock was found with blood on it nearby. Donnie Cochenour Jr., 27, was later arrested and ordered held on $2 million bond after he pleaded not guilty to murder.

Cade apparently knew Cochenour since he was a child — a relationship going back 20 years. Cochenour reportedly admitted that he he had had a physical altercation in the field. Police found a blood trail that indicates that Cade was running from Cochenour and tried to climb the fence in an attempt to get away. She was found hanging from her sleeve and is believed to have died on the fence from blunt force trauma to the head and neck. Her body exhibited “defensive wounds.”

When police arrested Cochenour, they found blood on is clothing. _______________________________________________

In 2015, the federal and state governments are cracking down on cosmetic contact lenses to give people spooky eyes. Owners and operators of 10 Southern California businesses were criminally charged in federal court with illegally selling cosmetic contact lenses without prescriptions. Some of the products that were purchased in connection with this investigation were contaminated with dangerous pathogens that can cause eye injury, blindness and loss of the eye. The products are likely to result in a slew of product liability actions.

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Another 2015 case reflects that the scariest part of shopping for Halloween costumes or decorations may be the trip to the Party Store. Shanisha L. Saulsberry sued U.S. Toy Company, Inc. after she was injured shopping for Halloween costumes and a store rack fell on her. The jury awarded Saulsberry $7,216.00 for economic damages. She appealed the damages after evidence of her injuries were kept out of the trial by the court. However, the Missouri appellate court affirmed the ruling.

_________________________________________ The case of Castiglione v. James F. Q., 115 A.D.3d 696, shows a classic Halloween tort. The lawsuit alleged that, on Halloween 2007, the defendant’s son threw an egg which hit the plaintiff’s daughter in the eye, causing her injuries. The plaintiff also brought criminal charges against the defendant’s son arising from this incident and the defendant’s son pleaded guilty to assault in the third degree (Penal Law § 120.00 [2]). However, at his deposition, the defendant’s son denied throwing the egg which allegedly struck the plaintiff’s daughter.

Because of the age of the accused, the case turned on the youthful offender statute (CPL art 720) provides special measures for persons found to be youthful offenders which provides “Except where specifically required or permitted by statute or upon specific authorization of the court, all official records and papers, whether on file with the court, a police agency or the division of criminal justice services, relating to a case involving a youth who has been adjudicated a youthful offender, are confidential and may not be made available to any person or public or private agency [with certain exceptions not relevant here]” (CPL 720.35 [2]). This covers both the physical documents constituting the official record the information contained within those documents. Thus, in relation to the Halloween egging, the boy was protected from having to disclose information or answer questions regarding the facts underlying the adjudication _____________________________

We discussed the perils of pranks and “jump frights,” particularly with people who do not necessarily consent. In the case of Christian Faith Benge, there appears to have been consent in visiting a haunted house. The sophomore from New Miami High School in Ohio died from a prior medical condition at the at Land of Illusion haunted house. She was halfway through the house with about 100 friends and family members when she collapsed. She had an enlarged heart four times its normal size. She also was born with congenital diaphragmatic hernia, which prevents the lungs from developing normally. This added stress to the heart. In such a case, consent and comparative negligence issues effectively bar recovery in most cases. It is a terrible loss of a wonderful young lady. However, some fatalities do not always come with liability and this appears such a case. Source: Journal News

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As discussed earlier, In Franklin County, Tennessee, children may want to avoid the house of Dale Bryant Farris, 65, this Halloween . . . or houses near him. Bryant was arrested after shooting a 15-year-old boy who was with kids toilet-papering their principal’s front yard. Bryant came out of his house a couple of houses down from the home of Principal Ken Bishop and allegedly fired at least two blasts — one hitting a 15-year-old boy in the right foot, inner left knee, right palm, right thigh and right side of his torso above the waistline.

Tennessee is a Castle Doctrine state and we have seen past cases like the notorious Tom Horn case in Texas where homeowners claimed the right to shoot intruders on the property of their neighbors. It is not clear if Bryant will argue that he was trying to stop intruders under the law, but it does not appear a good fit with the purpose or language of the law. Farris faces a charge of aggravated assault and another of reckless endangerment. He could also face civil liability from the boy’s family. This would include assault and battery. There is a privilege of both self-defense and defense of others. This privilege included reasonable mistaken self-defense or defense of others. This would not fit such a claim since he effectively pursued the boys by going to a neighbor’s property and there was no appearance of a threat or weapon since they were only armed with toilet paper.

The good news is that Farris can now discard the need for a costume. He can go as himself at Halloween . . . as soon as he is out of jail. _____________________________________________________ As shown below, Halloween nooses have a bad record at parties. In 2012, a club called Pink Punters had a decorative noose that it had used for a number of years that allowed party goers to take pictures as a hanging victim on Halloween. Of course, you guessed it. A 25-year old man was found hanging from the noose in an accidental self-lynching at the nightclub in England.

The case would appear easy to defend in light of the assumption of the risk and patent danger. The noose did not actually tighten around necks. Moreover, this is England where tort claims can be more challenging. In the United States, however, there would remain the question of a foreseeable accident in light of the fact that patrons are drinking heavily and drugs are often present at nightclubs. Since patrons are known to put their heads in the noose, the combination is intoxication and a noose is not a particularly good mix.

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Grant v. Grant.

A potential criminal and tort case comes to us from Pennsylvania where, at a family Halloween bonfire, Janet Grant spotted a skunk and told her son Thomas Grant to fetch a shotgun and shoot it. When he returned, Janet Grant shined a flashlight on the animal while her son shot it. It was only then that they discovered that Thomas Grant had just shot his eight-year-old cousin in her black and white Halloween costume. What is amazing is that authorities say that they are considering possible animal gaming charges.

Fortunately, the little girl survived with a wound to the shoulder and abdomen.

The police in Beaver County have not brought charges and alcohol does not appear to have been a factor.

Putting aside the family connection (which presumably makes the likelihood of a lawsuit unlikely), there is a basis for both battery and negligence in such a wounding. With children in the area, the discharge of the firearm would seem pretty unreasonable even with the effort to illuminate “the animal.” Moreover, this would have to have been a pretty large skunk to be the size of an eight-year-old child.

Just for the record, the average weight of a standard spotted skunk in that area is a little over 1 pound. The biggest skunk is a hog-nosed skunk that can reach up to 18 pounds.

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We also have a potential duel case out of Aiken, South Carolina from one year ago. A 10-year-old Aiken trick-or-treater pulled a gun on a woman who joked that she wanted take his candy on Halloween. Police found that his brother, also ten, had his own weapon.

The 28-year-old woman said that she merely joked with a group of 10 or so kids that she wanted their candy when the ten-year-old pulled out a 9 mm handgun and said “no you’re not.” While the magazine was not in the gun, he had a fully loaded magazine in his possession. His brother had the second gun. Both appear to have belonged to their grandfather.

The children were released to their parents and surprisingly there is no mention of charges against the grandfather. While the guns appear to have been taken without his permission, it shows great negligence in the handling and storage of the guns.

What would be interesting is a torts lawsuit by the woman for assault against the grandfather. The actions of third parties often cut off liability as a matter of proximate causation, though courts have held that you can be liable for creating circumstances where crimes or intentional torts are foreseeable. For example, a landlord was held liable in for crimes committed in his building in Kline v. 1500 Massachusetts Avenue. Here the grandfather’s negligence led to the use of the guns by these children. While a lawsuit is unlikely, it would certainly be an interesting — and not unwarranted — claim. Smith v. Taunton High School

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Tauton High School District

I am still trying to get the correct name of this lawsuit filed last year, but it involves a Halloween prank gone bad in Massachusetts. A teacher at Taunton High School asked a 15-year-old student to answer a knock on the classroom door. When the boy was startled when he came face to face with a man in a mask and carrying what appeared to be a running chainsaw. The student fell back, tripped and fractured a kneecap. His family is now suing though the state cap on such lawsuits is $100,000.

Dussault said the family is preparing a lawsuit, but is exploring ways to avoid a trial and do better than the $100,000 cap when suing city employees. This could make for an interesting case, but would be better for the Plaintiffs as a bench versus a jury trial. Many jurors are likely to view this as simply an attempt at good fun by the teacher and an unforeseeable accident.

Source: CBS

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In Florida, a woman has sued for defamation, harassment and emotional distress after her neighbor set up decorations that included an insane asylum sign that pointed to her yard and a fake tombstone with an inscription she viewed as a reference to her single status. It read, “At 48 she had no mate no date/ It’s no debate she looks 88.”

This could be a wonderful example of an opinion defense to defamation. As for emotional distress, I think the cause of the distress pre-dates Halloween.

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Pieczonka v. Great America (2012)

A family is suing Great America for a tort in 2011 at Great Falls. Father Marian Pieczonka alleged in his complaint that his young daughter Natalie was at the park in Gurnee, Illinois for the Halloween-themed Fright Fest when a park employee dressed in costume jumped out of a port-a-potty and shot her with a squirt gun. He then reported chased the screaming girl until she fell and suffered injuries involving scrapes and bruises. The lawsuit alleges negligence in encouraging employees to chase patrons giving the tripping hazards.

They are asking $30,000 in the one count complaint but could face assumption or comparative negligence questions, particularly in knowingly attending an event called “Fright Fest” where employees were known to jump out at patrons.

The one-count suit seeks $30,000 in damages.

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A lawsuit appears inevitable after a tragic accident in St. Louis where a 17-year-old girl is in a critical condition after she became tangled in a noose at a Halloween haunted house called Creepyworld. The girl was working as an actress at the attraction and was found unconscious. What is particularly chilling is that people appeared to have walked by her hanging in the house and thought she was a realistic prop.

Notably, the attraction had people walk through to check on the well-being of actors and she was discovered but not for some time after the accident. She is in critical condition. Creepyworld employs 100 people and can expect a negligence lawsuit.

Source:

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Rabindranath v. Wallace (2010)

Peter Wallace, 24, was returning on a train with fellow Hiberinian soccer fans in England — many dressed in costumes (which the English call “fancy dress.”) One man was dressed as a sheep and Wallace thought it was funny to constantly flick his lighter near the cotton balls covering his body — until he burst into flames. Friends then made the matter worse by trying to douse the flames but throwing alcohol on the flaming man-sheep. Even worse, the victim Aberdeen supporter Arjuna Rabindranath, 24, is an Aberdeen soccer fan. Rabindranath’s costume was composed of a white tracksuit and cotton wool.

Outcome: Wallace is the heir to a large farm estate and agreed to pay damages to the victim, who experienced extensive burns.

What is fascinating is the causation issue. Here, Wallace clearly caused the initial injury which was then made worse by the world’ most dim-witted rescue attempt in the use of alcohol to douse a fire. In the United States, the original tortfeasor is liable for such injuries caused by negligent rescues. Indeed, he is liable for injured rescuers. The rescuers can also be sued in most states. However, many areas of Europe have good Samaritan laws protecting such rescuers. Notably, Wallace had a previous football-related conviction which was dealt with by a fine. In this latest case, he agreed to pay 25,000 in compensation.

The case is obviously similar to one of our prior Halloween winners below: Ferlito v. Johnson & Johnson

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Perper v. Forum Novelties (2010)

Sherri Perper, 56, of Queens, New York has filed a personal injury lawsuit due to defective shoes allegedly acquired from Forum Novelties. The shoes were over-sized clown shoes that she was wearing as part of her Halloween costume in 2008. She tripped and fell.

She is reportedly claiming that the shoes were dangerous. While “open and obvious” is no longer an absolute defense in such products cases, such arguments may still be made to counter claims of defective products. In most jurisdictions, you must show that the product is more dangerous than the expectations of the ordinary consumer. It is hard to see how Perper could be surprised that it is a bit difficult to walk in over-sized shoes. Then there is the problem of assumption of the risk.

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Dickson v. Hustonville Haunted House and Greg Walker (2009) Glenda Dickson, 51, broke four vertebrae in her back when she fell out of second

story window left open at the Hustonville Haunted House, owned by Greg Walker.

Dickson was in a room called “The Crying Lady in the Bed” when one of the actors came up behind the group and started screaming. Everyone jumped in fright and Dickson jumped back through an open window that was covered with a sheet — a remarkably negligent act by the haunted house operator. She landed on a fire escape and then fell down some stairs.

OUTCOME: While no criminal charges are planned, this would appear a likely case for a lawsuit for negligence. Since it only happened yesterday, we may have to follow up next year to see if this got really scary.

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Maryland v. Janik (2009)

Sgt. Eric Janik, 37, went to a haunted house called the House of Screams with friends and when confronted by a character dressed as Leatherface with a chainsaw (sans the chain, of course), Janik pulled out his service weapon and pointed it at the man, who immediately dropped character, dropped the chainsaw, and ran like a bat out of Halloween Hell.

Outcome: Janik is charged with assault and reckless endangerment for his actions. Charges pending.

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Patrick v. South Carolina (2009) Quentin Patrick, 22, an ex-convict in Sumter, South Carolina shot and killed a trick-or-treater T.J. Darrisaw who came to his home on Halloween — spraying nearly 30 rounds with an assault rifle from inside his home after hearing a knock on the door. T.J.’s 9-year- old brother, Ahmadre Darrisaw, and their father, Freddie Grinnell, were injured but were released after being treated at a hospital.

Patrick left his porch light on — a general signal for kids that the house was open for trick and treating. The boy’s mother and toddler sibling were in the car.

Patrick emptied the AK-47 — shooting at least 29 times through his front door, walls and windows after hearing the knock. He said that he had been previously robbed. That may be so, but it is unclear what an ex-con was doing with a gun, let alone an AK-47.

OUTCOME: Charges pending for murder.

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Kentucky v. Watkins (2008)

As a Halloween prank, restaurant manager Joe Watkins of the Chicken Ranch in Paris, Kentucky thought it was funny to lie in a pool of blood on the floor. After seeing Watkins on the floor, the woman went screaming from the restaurant to report the murder. Watkins said that the prank was for another employee and that he tried to call the woman back on her cell phone.

OUTCOME: Under Kentucky law, a person can be charged with a false police report, even if he is not the one who filed it. The police charged Watkins for causing the woman to file the report — a highly questionable charge.

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Mays v. Gretna Athletic Boosters␣95-717 (La.App. 5 Cir. 01/17/96)

“Defendant operated a haunted house at Mel Ott Playground in Gretna to raise money for athletic programs. The haunted house was constructed of 2×4s and black visqueen. There were numerous cubbyholes where “scary” exhibits were displayed. One booster club member was stationed at the entrance and one at the exit. Approximately eighteen people participated in the haunted house by working the exhibits inside. Near and along the entrance of the haunted house was a bathroom building constructed of cinder blocks. Black visqueen covered this wall.

Plaintiff and her daughter’s friend, about 10 years old, entered the haunted house on October 29, 1988. It was nighttime and was dark inside. Plaintiff testified someone jumped out and hollered, scaring the child into running. Plaintiff was also frightened and began to run. She ran directly into the visqueen-covered cinder block wall.

There was no lighting in that part of the haunted house. Plaintiff hit the wall face first and began bleeding profusely from her nose. She testified two surgeries were required to repair her nose.”

OUTCOME: In order to get the proper effect, haunted houses are dark and contain scary and/or shocking exhibits. Patrons in a Halloween haunted house are expected to be surprised, startled and scared by the exhibits but the operator does not have a duty to guard against patrons reacting in bizarre, frightened and unpredictable ways. Operators are duty bound to protect patrons only from unreasonably dangerous conditions, not from every conceivable danger.

As found by the Trial Court, defendant met this duty by constructing the haunted house with rooms of adequate size and providing adequate personnel and supervision for patrons entering the house. Defendant’s duty did not extend to protecting plaintiff from running in a dark room into a wall. Our review of the entire record herein does not reveal manifest error committed by the Trial Court or that the Trial Court’s decision was clearly wrong. Plaintiff has not shown the haunted house was unreasonably dangerous or that defendant’s actions were unreasonable. Thus, the Trial Court judgment must be affirmed.

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Powell v. Jacor Communications␣

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

320 F.3d 599 (6th Cir.2003)

“On October 15, 1999, Powell visited a Halloween season haunted house in Lexington, Kentucky that was owned and operated by Jacor. She was allegedly hit in the head with an unidentified object by a person she claims was dressed as a ghost. Powell was knocked unconscious and injured. She contends that she suffered a concussion and was put on bed rest and given medications by emergency-room physicians. Powell further claims that she now suffers from several neuropsychological disorders as a result of the incident.”

OUTCOME: Reversed dismissal on the basis of tolling of statute of limitations.

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Kansas City Light & Power Company v. Trimble␣

315 Mo. 32; 285 S.W. 455 (1926)

“A shapely pole to which, twenty-two feet from the ground is attached a non-insulated electric wire . . Upon a shapely pole were standard steps eighteen inches apart; about seventeen feet from the ground were telephone wires, and five feet above them was a non-insulated electric light wire. On Halloween, about nine o’clock, a bright fourteen- year-old boy and two companions met close to the pole, and some girls dressed as clowns came down the street. As they came near the boy, saying, “Who dares me to walk the wire?” began climbing the pole, using the steps, and ascended to the telephone cables, and thereupon his companions warned him about the live wire and told him to come down. He crawled upon the telephone cables to a distance of about ten feet from the pole, and when he reached that point a companion again warned him of the live wire over his head, and threatened to throw a rock at him and knock him off if he did not come down. Whereupon he turned about and crawled back to the pole, and there raised himself to a standing position, and then his foot slipped, and involuntarily he threw up his arm, his hand clutched the live wire, and he was shocked to death.”

OUTCOME:

Frankly, I am not sure why the pole was so “shapely” but the result was disappointing for the plaintiffs. Kansas City Light & Power Company v. Trimble: The court held that the appellate court extended the attractive nuisance doctrine beyond the court’s ruling decisions. The court held that appellate court’s opinion on the contributory negligence doctrine conflicted with the court’s ruling decisions. The court held that the administrator’s case should never have been submitted to the jury. The court quashed the appellate opinion.

“To my mind it is inconceivable that a bright, intelligent boy, doing well in school, past fourteen years of age and living in the city, would not understand and appreciate the fact that it would be dangerous to come in contact with an electric wire, and that he was undertaking a dangerous feat in climbing up the pole; but even if it may be said that men might differ on that proposition, still in this case he was warned of the wire and of the danger on account of the wire and that, too, before he had reached a situation where there was any occasion or necessity of clutching the wire to avoid a fall. Not only was he twice warned but he was repeatedly told and urged to come down.”

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Purtell v. Mason␣ 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 49064 (E.D. Ill. 2006)

“The Purtells filed the present lawsuit against Defendant Village of Bloomingdale Police Officer Bruce Mason after he requested that they remove certain Halloween tombstone “decorations” from their property. Evidence presented at trial revealed that the Purtells placed the tombstones referring to their neighbors in their front yard facing the street. The tombstones specifically referred to their neighbors, who saw the language on the tombstones. For instance, the tombstone that referred to the Purtells’ neighbor James Garbarz stated:

Here Lies Jimmy, The OlDe Towne IdioT MeAn As sin even withouT his Gin No LonGer Does He wear That sTupiD Old Grin . . . Oh no, noT where they’ve sent Him!

The tombstone referring to the Purtells’ neighbor Betty Garbarz read:

BeTTe wAsN’T ReADy, BuT here she Lies Ever since that night she DieD. 12 feet Deep in this trench . . . Still wasn’T Deep enough For that wenches Stench!

In addition, the Purtells placed a Halloween tombstone in their yard concerning their neighbor Diane Lesner stating:

Dyean was Known for Lying So She was fried. Now underneath these daises is where she goes crazy!!

Moreover, the jury heard testimony that Diane Lesner, James Garbarz, and Betty Garbarz were upset because their names appeared on the tombstones. Betty Garbarz testified that she was so upset by the language on the tombstones that she contacted the Village of Bloomingdale Police Department. She further testified that she never had any doubt that the “Bette” tombstone referred to her. After seeing the tombstones, she stated that she was ashamed and humiliated, but did not talk to Jeffrey Purtell about them because she was afraid of him.

Defense counsel also presented evidence that the neighbors thought the language on the tombstones constituted threats and that they were alarmed and disturbed by their names being on the tombstones. James Garbarz testified that he interpreted the “Jimmy” tombstone as a threat and told the police that he felt threatened by the tombstone. He also testified that he had concerns about his safety and what Jeffrey Purtell might do to him.”

OUTCOME: The court denied the homeowners’ post-trial motion for judgment as a matter of law pursuant to and motion for a new trial. Viewing the evidence and all reasonable inferences in a light most favorable to Officer Mason, a rational jury could conclude that the language on the tombstones constituted threats, that the neighbors were afraid of Jeffrey Purtell, and that they feared for their safety. As such the Court will not disturb the jury’s conclusion that the tombstones constituted fighting words — “those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

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Goodwin v. Walmart␣

2001 Ark. App. LEXIS 78

“On October 12, 1993, Randall Goodwin went to a Wal-Mart store located on 6th Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He entered through the front door and walked toward the sporting goods department. In route, he turned down an aisle known as the seasonal aisle. At that time, it was stocked with items for Halloween. This aisle could be observed from the cash registers. Mr. Goodwin took only a few steps down the aisle when he allegedly stepped on a wig and fell, landing on his right hip. As a result of the fall, Mr. Goodwin suffered severe physical injury to his back, including a ruptured disk. Kelly Evans, an employee for appellee, was standing at the end of her check-out stand when Mr. Goodwin approached her and informed her that he had fallen on an item in the seasonal aisle. She stated that she “saw what he was talking about.”

OUTCOME: Judgment affirmed because the pleadings, depositions, and related summary judgment evidence did not show that there was any genuine issue of material fact as appellant customer did not establish plastic bag containing the Halloween wig which allegedly caused him to slip and fall was on the floor as the result of appellee’s negligence or it had been on the floor for such a period of time that appellee knew or should have known about it.

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Eversole v. Wasson␣ 80 Ill. App. 3d 94 (Ill. 1980)

“The following allegations of count I, directed against defendant Wasson, were incorporated in count II against the school district: (1) plaintiff was a student at Villa Grove High School which was controlled and administered by the defendant school district, (2) defendant Wasson was employed by the school district as a teacher at the high school, (3) on November 1, 1978, at approximately 12:30 p.m., Wasson was at the high school in his regular capacity as a teacher and plaintiff was attending a regularly scheduled class, (4) Wasson sought and received permission from another teacher to take plaintiff from that teacher’s class and talk to him in the hallway, (5) once in the hallway, Wasson accused plaintiff of being one of several students he believed had smashed Wasson’s Halloween pumpkin at Wasson’s home, (6) without provocation from plaintiff, Wasson berated plaintiff, called him vile names, and threatened him with physical violence while shaking his fist in plaintiff’s face which placed plaintiff in fear of bodily injury, (7) Wasson then struck plaintiff about the head and face with both an open hand and a closed fist and shook and shoved him violently, (8) as a result, plaintiff was bruised about the head, neck, and shoulders; experienced pain and suffering in his head, body, and limbs; and became emotionally distraught causing his school performance and participation to be adversely affected . . .”

OUTCOME: The court affirmed that portion of the lower court’s order that dismissed the count against the school district and reversed that portion of the lower court’s order that entered a judgment in bar of action as to this count. The court remanded the case to the lower court with directions to allow the student to replead his count against the school district.

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Holman v. Illinois␣

47 Ill. Ct. Cl. 372 (1995)

“The Claimant was attending a Halloween party at the Illinois State Museum with her grandson on October 26, 1990. The party had been advertised locally in the newspaper and through flier advertisements. The advertisement requested that children be accompanied by an adult, to come in costume and to bring a flashlight. The museum had set up different display rooms to hand out candy to the children and give the appearance of a “haunted house.” The Claimant entered the Discovery Room with her grandson.

Under normal conditions the room is arranged with tables and low-seated benches for children to use in the museum’s regular displays. These tables and benches had been moved into the upper-right-hand corner of the Discovery Room next to the wall. In the middle of the room, there was a “slime pot” display where the children received the Halloween treat. The overhead fluorescent lights were turned off; however, the track lights on the left side of the room were turned on and dim. The track lights on the right side of the room near the tables and benches were not lit. The room was dark enough that the children’s flashlights could be clearly seen. There were approximately 40-50 people in the room at the time of the accident.

The Claimant entered the room with her grandson. They proceeded in the direction of the pot in the middle of the room to see what was going in the pot. Her grandson then ran around the pot to the right corner toward the wall. As the Claimant followed, she tripped over the corner of a bench stored in that section of the room. She fell, making contact with the left corner of the bench. She experienced great pain in her upper left arm. The staff helped her to her feet. Her father was called and she went to the emergency room. Claimant has testified that she did not see the low-seating bench because it was so dimly lit in the Discovery Room. The Claimant was treated at the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with a fracture of the proximal humeral head of her left arm as a result of the fall. Claimant returned home, but was unable to work for 12 to 13 weeks.”

OUTCOME: “The Claimant has met her burden of proof. She has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the State acted negligently in placing furnishings in a dimly-lit room where visitors could not know of their location. The State did not exercise its duty of reasonable care. For the foregoing reasons, the Claimant is granted an award of $ 20,000.”

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Ferlito v. Johnson & Johnson␣

771 F. Supp. 196 “Plaintiffs Susan and Frank Ferlito, husband and wife, attended a Halloween party in 1984 dressed as Mary (Mrs. Ferlito) and her little lamb (Mr. Ferlito). Mrs. Ferlito had constructed a lamb costume for her husband by gluing cotton batting manufactured by defendant Johnson & Johnson Products (“JJP”) to a suit of long underwear. She had also used defendant’s product to fashion a headpiece, complete with ears. The costume covered Mr. Ferlito from his head to his ankles, except for his face and hands, which were blackened with Halloween paint. At the party Mr. Ferlito attempted to light his cigarette by using a butane lighter. The flame passed close to his left arm, and the cotton batting on his left sleeve ignited. Plaintiffs sued defendant for injuries they suffered from burns which covered approximately one-third of Mr. Ferlito’s body.”

OUTCOME: Ferlito v. Johnson & Johnson: Plaintiffs repeatedly stated in their response brief that plaintiff Susan Ferlito testified that “she would never again use cotton batting to make a costume.” Plaintiffs’ Answer to Defendant JJP’s Motion for J.N.O.V., pp. 1, 3, 4, 5. However, a review of the trial transcript reveals that plaintiff Susan Ferlito never testified that she would never again use cotton batting to make a costume. More importantly, the transcript contains no statement by plaintiff Susan Ferlito that a flammability warning on defendant JJP’s product would have dissuaded her from using the cotton batting to construct the costume in the first place. At oral argument counsel for plaintiffs conceded that there was no testimony during the trial that either plaintiff Susan Ferlito or her husband, plaintiff Frank J. Ferlito, would [**9] have acted any different if there had been a flammability warning on the product’s package. The absence of such testimony is fatal to plaintiffs’ case; for without it, plaintiffs have failed to prove HN9proximate cause, one of the essential elements of their negligence claim.

In addition, both plaintiffs testified that they knew that cotton batting burns when it is exposed to flame. Susan Ferlito testified that she knew at the time she purchased the cotton batting that it would burn if exposed to an open flame. Frank Ferlito testified that he knew at the time he appeared at the Halloween party that cotton batting would burn if exposed to an open flame. His additional testimony that he would not have intentionally put a flame to the cotton batting shows that he recognized the risk of injury of which he claims JJP should have warned. Because both plaintiffs were already aware of the danger, a warning by JJP would have been superfluous. Therefore, a reasonable jury could not have found that JJP’s failure to provide a warning was a proximate cause of plaintiffs’ injuries.

The evidence in this case clearly demonstrated that neither the use to which plaintiffs put JJP’s product nor the injuries arising from that use were foreseeable.

But in Trivino v. Jamesway Corporation, the following result:

The mother purchased cosmetic puffs and pajamas from the retailer. The mother glued the puffs onto the pajamas to create a costume for her child. While wearing the costume, the child leaned over the electric stove. The costume caught on fire, injuring the child. Plaintiffs brought a personal injury action against the retailer. The retailer filed a third party complaint against the manufacturer of the puffs, and the puff manufacturer filed a fourth party complaint against the manufacturer of the fibers used in the puffs. The retailer filed a motion for partial summary judgment as to plaintiffs’ cause of action for failure to warn. The trial court granted the motion and dismissed the actions against the manufacturers. On appeal, the court modified the judgment, holding that the mother’s use of the puffs was not unforeseeable as a matter of law and was a question for the jury. The court held that because the puffs were not made of cotton, as thought by the mother, there were fact issues as to the puffs’ flammability and defendants’ duty to warn. The court held that there was no prejudice to the retailer in permitting plaintiffs to amend their bill of particulars.

OUTCOME: The court modified the trial court’s judgment to grant plaintiffs’ motion to amend their bill of particulars, deny the retailer’s motion for summary judgment, and reinstate the third party actions against the manufacturers.

Spooky Torts: The 2018 List Of Halloween Litigation Horrors published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Philanthropists need to take a step back from the American education system before it ruins them, they ruin it, or both.

Major philanthropies like the Gates, Walton Family, and Broad Foundations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually in an attempt to transform American K-12 education. Gates alone reported spending nearly $390 million in 2017; the Waltons spent more than $190 million. That’s a non-trivial chunk of the $67 billion all US foundations spent on all projects that year.

Such contributions have come under fire in recent years. The big foundations promote a particular set of K-12 education policies — including increased accountability for teachers, more school choice, and higher-stakes testing — that are profoundly controversial, and that teachers unions and skeptical education researchers have spent years questioning and resisting. The foundations’ use of billions in spending to change public policy on education raises troubling questions about democratic accountability and the role of money in politics (questions given new prominence when a major conservative education funder became US secretary of education).

Those are both valid lines of critique, but they’re not the ones I’m going to pursue here. (I am frankly more sympathetic to the Gates/Walton/Broad education reform agenda than a lot of my left-leaning friends.)

My beef, rather, is that improving the American education system, while important, is neither a neglected cause nor a tractable one. It is a system on which hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually by diffuse governments whose policies are difficult and expensive to change, where matters of importance are intensely contested, and where interest groups tend to fight each other to a standstill.

And it’s a system where, even after investing millions if not billions in research, we still don’t have a lot of confidence as to which interventions are helpful and which are not. The views of key actors, notably the Gates Foundation, have tended to shift rapidly on those substantive questions.

If every issue in the world were as crowded and hard to make progress on as education in the US, then I’d understand why foundations like Gates and Broad keep chugging. But that’s not the case. There really are areas that are very, very important, and where progress is easier, because the political fights around them are less crowded and intense. Many of these foundations are already investing in a few of these causes.

That, if anything, makes their continued focus on US education more baffling. They know there are better causes. They should lean into them.

The framework for judging causes based on importance, neglectedness, and tractability (INT, for short) is not new. It originates with the Open Philanthropy Project, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on finding high-impact giving opportunities, and its predecessor organization GiveWell Labs.

Open Philanthropy and its sister foundation Good Ventures, which is funded primarily by the groups’ president Cari Tuna and her husband, Dustin Moskovitz, use the framework to guide most of their hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable contributions. The nonprofit 80,000 Hours, which offers career guidance to people looking to make a social impact in their job, uses the framework too, and the Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill has a useful breakdown of how it works in his book Doing Good Better.

It’s hardly perfect, but I find it very useful. A good baseline test for any philanthropist is that they work on issues that are genuinely important — but that’s not enough of a filtering mechanism. A lot of stuff is important! Comparing relative importance is certainly possible; I think arts education is wonderful and important, but few would dispute that, say, funding field trips to art museums for rich US boarding school students is less important than making sure kids in extremely poor countries like Burundi, Afghanistan, or Haiti get quality instruction in math and reading.

But importance comparisons are often tricky and subjective, especially within given cause areas. If you’re interested in local US poverty alleviation, should you fund a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter? If you want to give to global health causes, should you donate to charities handing out insecticidal bednets to people in sub-Saharan Africa or to charities doing mass deworming projects?

That’s where thinking about neglectedness and tractability can help. Even when choosing among equally important causes, you probably should choose the cause that is more neglected, that has less money and fewer resources mobilized behind it than others. The basic reason is diminishing marginal returns: The first million dollars you spend on something is likely to have a much bigger impact than the second million, so it pays to look for causes where you’re closer to the first million spent than the second. Keeping neglectedness in mind can also prevent duplicating work that would’ve been done by another organization.

For instance, mass immunization campaigns targeting common diseases like polio, measles, and yellow fever are super-effective ways to prevent disease and save lives. And precisely because of that, the GAVI Alliance, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization spend billions every year on immunization programs, from a variety of funders ranging from governments to big foundations (Gates alone has donated billions to this cause). It makes sense for other funders to look at that situation and think, “They have this covered — why don’t I try something else?”

More to the point, even if that funder decided they ultimately did want to fund immunizations, they’d probably pay more per immunization than GAVI and other existing groups do. The existing firms are probably getting all the low-hanging fruit, forcing this hypothetical new funder to look for harder cases that are more expensive.

Tractability is the final criterion in this framework, and worth breaking down a bit further. For a cause to be tractable, funders don’t just have to know of cost-effective interventions that can help; they have to know ways to get those interventions adopted. If you, for some reason, supported reviving alcohol prohibition in America, there’s basically no way a temperance movement is going to succeed in the 21st century. Rather than wasting billions in an effort to revive the 18th Amendment, you should direct it somewhere it has better odds of effecting change.

So let’s apply this framework to K-12 education. It is not a neglected cause. The US spent $668 billion on public elementary and secondary schools for the 2014-’15 school year. That’s more than the US spends on the military (about $583.4 billion in calendar year 2015), and in terms of total expenditures is probably only outpaced by health care and Social Security/pensions among government priorities.

That is not a bad thing! Good education costs money, and a few particularly rigorous economics studies in recent years have concluded that spending more on education typically improves student performance, as you’d hope. And under some circumstances, the heavy government investment in education would make a philanthropic investment more advisable, not less. If you can spend a few million dollars on think tanks, lobbying, etc. and change government policies affecting billions in annual spending, that’s pretty damn good leverage.

But the cause of trying to shift K-12 education resources in one direction or another is also extremely crowded. Teachers unions like those organized under the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association are not the all-powerful behemoths that some reformers paint them as being (and the Supreme Court’s ruling barring them from collecting fees from nonmembers promises to weaken them considerably). But they did spend $35 million in campaign contributions in 2016, and they spend millions more on lobbying annually.

If you consider their collective bargaining activities a form of political spending meant to shift public policy, their investment increases substantially. That spending coexists with the hundreds of millions that foundations like Gates, Walton, and Broad devote to the issue.

This spending is not additive; it’s clashing. And that’s a problem, from the standpoint of effectiveness. The most careful study of lobbying in America yet conducted — Lobbying and Policy Change by Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball, and Beth Leech — concludes that one reason the political system is biased toward preserving status quo policies is that groups lobbying on a given issue typically “faced organized opposition with roughly similar resources.”

That is, policy doesn’t change because two evenly matched sides fight each other to a draw. So when there’s a policy change that, say, Walton Family Foundation-supported reformers want for schools in DC, and the Washington Teachers Union wants to maintain the status quo, the two are likely to mobilize considerable resources to achieve a result no different from the status quo.

That’s, in a way, a win for the Washington Teachers Union, but the same dynamic plays in reverse if, say, WTU wanted to implement a change to DC education policy and Walton wanted to hold the line. The result is each spending millions to maintain a policy status quo that leaves neither fully satisfied.

That’s just how democratic politics, of all sorts, tends to work. Passionate interests on each side of an issue mobilize and fight and the stronger coalition, whether measured in money or grassroots support, ultimately prevails. And despite its considerable virtues, it’s a pretty wasteful process, especially on highly controversial topics like education in which much of the public is heavily invested. For philanthropists especially, it’s doubtful that investing heavily in a crowded, high-profile topic will turn out to be the most efficient possible use of resources.

And then there’s tractability. The non-neglectedness of K-12 education in America itself makes the issue less tractable, for the reasons described above. But there’s also the problem that, despite massive investments in education research by Gates and other foundations, expert disagreement persists about what actually works. More than that, disagreement and shifting positions on interventions is common even within foundations.

Consider the small schools experiment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Gates, in conjunction with allied foundations like the Annenberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Open Society Institute, and Pew Charitable Trusts, began offering well over $2 billion in grants to encourage school districts to break up large high schools into smaller schools. Gates was always eager to emphasize the schools were not merely small, but that breaking up schools into new institutions allowed those institutions to develop “high expectations,” “performance-based” cultures; The small size also allowed more personalized attention on individual students, or so the theory went.

The experiment, or at least Gates’s involvement, did not last very long. In 2005, an evaluation from the American Institutes of Research and SRI International suggested the intervention was falling short of expectations. His most vociferous critics alleged that the intervention was based on a basic statistical fallacy (inferring that small schools are good because they’re overrepresented among top high schools), a story that made its way into Daniel Kahneman’s pop science best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

In his 2009 “annual letter,” Bill Gates conceded, “Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way … in most cases, we fell short.” The foundation mostly abandoned the small schools idea.

Its next project, the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, pivoted from trying to promote a certain model of school to trying to figure out and promote a good model of teacher evaluation (the exceptional education reporter Dana Goldstein has an excellent paper looking at the MET investment in depth). Gates enlisted the well-respected Harvard education economist Thomas Kane, who conducted extensive randomized research concluding that evaluators could use a mix of standardized tests, student evaluations, and videotaped classroom sessions to identify teachers who cause more student learning to happen.

In addition, starting in 2009, the foundation began funding trials in three school districts and four charter groups, where they tested the new teacher evaluation methods they were developing. The hope was that using better evaluation methods would lead to more student learning or higher high school graduation rates.

No dice. A RAND Corporation report found that overall, the effects of the changes were minimal, at times even harmful.

“Several years into the initiative, there was evidence that it was helping high school reading in Pittsburgh and at the charter networks, but hurting elementary and middle school math in Memphis and among the charters,” Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat summarizes. “In most cases there were no clear effects, good or bad. There was also no consistent pattern of results over time.”

Allan Golston, who runs the US program at the Gates Foundation, recently suggested that the organization was ready to pivot again in response, saying, “We have taken these lessons to heart, and they are reflected in the work that we’re doing moving forward.” Even before the study’s release, Melinda Gates told the Associated Press that the program was a disappointment.

But over the past decade, as Gates abandoned small schools and pivoted to teacher evaluation work, a funny thing happened. Two randomized studies on small schools came in suggesting that Gates had been too hasty and they did improve student performance. In a series of reports released between 2010 and 2014, MDRC found that New York City students randomly sorted into small public high schools had higher graduation rates (71.6 percent versus 62.2 percent) and higher college enrollment (49 percent versus 40.7 percent) than those in traditional large schools.

Economists Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Weiwei Hu, and Parag Pathak also evaluated the New York City small schools, exploiting the lottery used to determine enrollment in the schools, and found that they boosted college enrollment, reduced the use of remedial college courses, and improved test scores in math, English, science, and history. A few non-randomized studies reached the same conclusion.

But while he acknowledged the new evidence in a note last year, Gates has moved on from small schools. He operated at a swifter pace than that at which the evidence rolled in. It’s enough to make one wonder if the conclusion of the teacher effectiveness effort — whose RAND evaluation wasn’t randomized — will prove different as well, and subsequent research will redeem the approach.

Or maybe it won’t! Or maybe the small schools studies and their promising findings won’t replicate. My point isn’t to take one side or another. It’s merely to point at the Gates experience investing in education and ask: What good did they do here? They provided policymakers with some new evidence, for sure, but pilot programs might have done the same without costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But did we get closer to an effective school system because of the Gates investments? Did we move farther away?

Even if Gates does eventually settle on an approach to education policy that seems highly effective, will it be cost-effective relative to something dead simple, like handing out cash instead?

That might sound like a silly question, but the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst estimates that cash programs, like the earned income tax credit, do considerably more to boost student test scores than even education interventions generally known to be somewhat effective, like reducing class size or investing in pre-K. It’s a good benchmarking question to ask about any educational intervention, and it’s far from clear that there are improvements to US schools out there that exceed that bar.

Again, all of this sidesteps the question of whether the Gates Foundation could successfully spread effective policies once it identified them — and if it could do the policy spreading in a cost-effective way as well. Maybe it could! But it’s hard to do when you can’t even determine the effective policy you want to spread in the first place.

I don’t mean to argue that all of Gates’s spending has been wasted. He’s funded some good, important research. But when he announced another huge $1.7 billion education push in fall 2017, the obvious question was: How much of that money will bear fruit? And what are the odds that Gates will wind up abandoning this approach as well?

Gates’s lukewarm track record on US education hasn’t kept other billionaires out of the field. Quite the contrary: Education is only becoming more popular as a cause area.

The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the charitable group founded by Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has made education one of its top cause areas, pledging to “help every child access personalized educational experiences that can change the trajectory of their life.” Again, in theory and in a vacuum, an admirable and important goal; in practice, likely a quixotic one.

Indeed, a town in Connecticut wound up rejecting a CZI-sponsored personalized learning program when, New York magazine reports, “bizarre and sometimes inappropriate images appeared on their kids’ screens on third-party websites used as reading assignments: a pot plant, a lubricant ad, and then the coup de grâce, an ancient Roman statue of a man having sex with a goose.”

All charities face a learning curve, of course, and Cheshire, Connecticut, is alone in rejecting the program, while some 380 other school districts and charter schools still participate. But that raises its own questions: Why is CZI funding a program in hundreds of school districts without doing a small-scale, independently evaluated pilot to see, preliminarily, if it works? Why have Gates and Bezos signed on as funders for this program too?

The Bezos Family Foundation’s website, smartly, warns that “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to education — but is quick to add that “education is the silver bullet.” While pre-K is less crowded as a cause than K-12 education (or higher ed, which is its own whole mess of a situation), Bezos’s decision to spend billions funding his own line of preschools in the US without a comparable investment abroad betrays an implicit judgment that improving government services in the richest country on earth is higher-impact than doing that in, say, a poor country without universal education of any kind.

But to argue that foundations should pivot away from education, one must give them an alternative cause first. Gates is frankly the foundation about which I’m least concerned in this regard. Its record on global health is not spotless, but it’s far better than the foundation’s track record on US education. If you look at a promising cause in global health — wiping out malaria with the help of CRISPR, fighting smoking in low-income countries, trying to develop a universal flu vaccine — odds are that at least some Gates money is behind it.

But there are promising causes outside Gates’s scope too, that both his foundation and Bezos and Chan-Zuckerberg could pursue instead of giving deeper to education. To name just a couple:

As Flint, Michigan, has reminded us, lead poisoning continues to impose massive social costs in the US. One cost-benefit analysis suggested that $1 spent on lead abatement produces between $17 and $221 in social benefits. That’s just one study, but the overall evidence base for the intervention looks much firmer than most education interventions. I’ve found one lead-related study that Gates funded, but other than that, Gates, Bezos, and CZI are mostly absent on the issue.

Macroeconomic policymaking at the Federal Reserve influences trillions of dollars in economic activity globally but faces much less lobbying than policymaking in Congress, due in part to the frankly naive conceit that the Fed is “independent” from outside politics. As a result, there’s relatively little foundation money being spent ensuring that the agency that holds the fate of the global economy in its hands is making good decisions that prevent recessions and lower unemployment. It seems almost certain that the marginal lobbying dollar will do more good there than in education politics.

And then there are causes that have had next to no coverage. Suicides with pesticides are very common in the developing world and kill more than 100,000 people annually; banning certain highly lethal pesticides, as Sri Lanka has done, appears to dramatically cut suicide rates. I know of one highly effective group working on this problem, but it only works in a handful of countries, implying there could be room for more funders.

I’m pretty confident that those causes are more promising than K-12 education, but not 100 percent sure. I don’t have a large staff to do comprehensive cause selection research. Thankfully, billionaires’ foundations do! And given how difficult it’s proven to find good interventions in K-12 education, I strongly suspect those foundations can find more than enough projects elsewhere with a higher anticipated impact. They should start trying to do that.

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Original Source -> Billionaires are spending their fortunes reshaping America’s schools. It isn’t working.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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luckybouquetnachous-blog · 7 years

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recentanimenews · 7 years

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Three-Episode Test: Alex's Spring 2017

Welcome to the Three Episode Test, where Ani-Gamers contributors give you the low-down on what they're watching (or not) from the current simulcast season and why.

Attack on Titan (sequel)

Streaming on Crunchyroll While I wasn’t salivating in anticipation for the long-awaited return of Attack on Titan like many others, the plot threads left hanging at the conclusion of Season 1 kept me curious enough to come back after three years — eager to find out what new horrors await Eren and company in Season 2.

After a brief recap of what has already transpired in the titan-infested world, the second season dives right into the action with an introduction to the “Beast Titan” — a mysterious new threat whose presence opens up more questions than answers. Likewise, the discovery of a titan encased within the walls which protect humanity opens up its own can of worms.

While I’ve enjoyed these new mysteries, answers for which hopefully won’t require another three years of waiting, it’s the time taken to further develop the cast that has me sticking around to see how it all plays out. I especially appreciated the followup to the Season 2 premiere, which slows down the pace considerably to flesh out Sasha’s backstory. During this time, we finally get the necessary context to feel emotionally invested in the potato-loving country girl, and I only hope more of this kind of character development finds its way in amongst all of the brutal action that undoubtedly lies ahead. With only 12 episodes and a whole lot of story to tell, Attack on Titan’s sophomore season promises to be a briskly paced thrill ride that I’ll most definitely be watching every week.

My Hero Academia (sequel)

Streaming on Crunchyroll Spring 2017 is home to another highly anticipated sequel, though the wait for My Hero Academia’s second season has been considerably shorter than that of Attack on Titan. Ever since I watched the credits roll on the MHA Season 1 finale last June, I’ve been dying to find out what’s next for Deku and his peers at U.A. High after the League of Villains’ attack on the academy.

My love for this show is intrinsically tied to My Hero Academia’s incredibly diverse and wonderfully realized cast of characters, especially its underdog protagonist Izuku “Deku” Midoriya. Season 2 continues his story of becoming a hero after inheriting a Quirk (a.k.a. special ability) from the world’s greatest hero, All Might. While the premiere drags it feet in progressing the plot, thanks in large part to one too many flashbacks, the pace picks up in the subsequent two episodes, which deliver a thrilling, action-packed start to the academy’s annual sports festival.

It’s clear the festival will serve as the primary focus for the duration of Season 2, and if that means more jaw-dropping animation work from studio Bones, I’m all in. Who am I kidding? I was all in from the very beginning! I’m far too invested in these characters to back out now, and Season 2’s early hints at new budding rivalries between classmates only strengthen this sentiment. You can bet I’ll have my alarm set for 5:30am every Saturday to ensure I don’t miss a single episode as soon as it arrives.

Yowamushi Pedal New Generation (continuation)

Streaming on Crunchyroll The third season of TMS Entertainment’s cycling series got off to a solid start this past winter, and I’m pleased to say the first three episodes of Yowamushi Pedal New Generation’s latter half are even better than the twelve that precede them.

The bicycle club of Sohoku High has bid farewell to its former captains, welcomed in a new batch of eager freshman, and heads off to camp to prepare for the Inter-High. The seven-episode training arc of Yowamushi Pedal’s first season includes some of my favorite episodes of the entire series, so I was indeed thrilled to see Onoda, Imaizumi, Naruko, and the rest of the gang back at camp as they readied themselves for the big race.

While Onoda has been pulled out of the spotlight, New Generation makes valuable use of that time to develop the rest of the cast. Seeing the club’s cocky new freshman, Kaburagi, crippled with anxiety upon learning of the camp’s 1000km challenge was priceless. Plus, the surprise arrival of Koga, a senior who was the club’s equipment manager the year prior, and his attempt to usurp Teshima as the team captain was every bit as nerve wracking as I could have hoped. While I’m a bit disappointed New Generation’s training arc concluded after a mere three, albeit spectacular, episodes, I’m equally excited for the Inter-High to begin. So yes, like New Generation’s first twelve episodes, I have every intention of keeping up with the show on a weekly basis.

Sakura Quest

Streaming on Crunchyroll If you’ve been looking to fill the Shirobako-shaped void in your heart ever since that series concluded two years ago, your search has come to an end. P.A. Works is back with another original comedy about a group of young women who band together in the workplace to overcome whatever challenges may come their way. However, instead providing a window into anime production, Sakura Quest offers a look at what it’s like to work at a travel agency for a struggling town out in the boonies.

While the series is about a group of five girls, Yoshino is the star of the show. In an effort to escape small town country life for good, she desperately searches for a job in Tokyo, but her attempts are futile. After getting rejected a demoralizing number of times, Yoshino is offered a job to serve as the “Queen” of a struggling village and work with the tourism board to reinvigorate interest in the town.

In the first three episodes, we see Yoshino’s “need” to be a city girl slowly dissolve as she and four other gals develop a friendship working together to save the village. It’s a cute, light-hearted coming of age tale that is elevated by its cast of well-written characters, clever comedy, and expressive facial animations. Even if Sakura Quest ends up feeling like a reskinned Shirobako when all's said and done, I’m invested enough in Yoshino’s story to commit to watching each new episode every Wednesday.

Tsuki ga Kirei

Streaming on Crunchyroll For me, spring simply wouldn’t be complete without at least one sappy romance anime, and Tsuki ga Kirei does an excellent job of filling that role. The story centers around the budding romance between third-year junior high school students Kotarou Azumi and Akane Mizuno. Kotarou has a bit of a crush on Akane and, fortunately for him, the feeling is mutual.

Unlike many romance anime about two young kids, the awkwardness between Kotarou two and Kotarou is portrayed in a way that feels genuine and all too similar to some of my own relationships as an immature middle school kid. They’re fairly typical teens, each with their own set of friends and hobbies, and while the two are quite sociable with their peers, they’re incredibly shy around each other, relying on LINE as a safe and comfortable means of communication.

While at times Tsuki ga Kirei can come off as a glorified LINE advertisement, seeing Kotarou anxiously check his phone reminded me of my own awkward years as a middle school student, which were often spent on the family computer conversing with classmates over the messaging relic that is AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Sure, the animation isn’t much to write home about, but Tsuki ga Kirei’s adorable and somewhat nostalgic appeal, coupled with its beautiful, watercolor-esque art, makes for a promising new series that I intend to stick with all season long.

originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on April 21, 2017 at 9:00 PM.

By: Alex Osborn

#Anime #News #Ani-Gamers

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lamurdiparasian · 7 years

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The Problem With Taking Anything

One of the most incredible aspects of the screen-printing industry is the incredible diverse spectrum of customers that we can appeal to for our services. We literally can do anything for anybody. This is such a powerful fact that I think a lot of shops get lost when trying to determine who they should be marketing to for their business.

When asked who you sell to have you ever responded with, “Oh, we’ll take anything! We sell to everyone!”

For shops with the “We’ll take anything” business plan, often that wrong job can become a big burden and problem. It’s directionless. Not having a market to appeal to means you have to deal with these yahoos:

Tommy is that guy that slinks into your shop with the “greatest idea ever” for a new t-shirt line. Unfortunately, it’s main theme is ripping off another person’s idea. He just needs some help with the art and the production. If you can knock out some super cheap samples you’ll be his “printer for life” and he “won’t forget you” when his apparel line explodes.

No problem right?

Then there is Robert. He’s the owner of a local small business. He wants you to print him two sample shirts with his art on it to prove to him that you know what you are doing. Don’t you just love auditioning for work? He needs to see your quality before placing his big order. When he sends you the art, it was generated from one of those online t-shirt websites. He wants to keep things local, but he’s already been shopping around online.

Can you prove you can do the work for Robert? Do you want to?

Let’s not forget about Sally. She’s the head of the PTO at the school. She blasts into the shop on a late Wednesday afternoon with a baby in one hand and a coffee in another. We recorded her quote request, but I’m sure you heard this before too. “Hey! We need to get some spirit wear for the team’s parents in the stands, and if you could maybe even a cute onsie for Carol who just had her fourth baby with her second husband. They were married just last year you know. The season starts next Monday by the way, and I’ve been meaning to come in, but with book club, shopping, and my tennis lessons I just haven’t had the time. How big of a discount can I get if my husband promises to do his golf outing trip shirts with you next month? And, I hate to tell you this, but that new shop across town offered me a big discount if they put their logo on the sleeve. I’d like a big discount from you too, but I think printing a logo on the sleeve is tacky…do you have to do that? Ok, so whoever has the best price is getting the order, so sharpen your pencil! Can I just bring in checks from everyone getting shirts? Do you mind? I don’t want to have to pay for everything myself. Oooooh, I just had an idea! What if you created an order form for me? Could you do that? What about a website? That’s even better! There’s some good news on the art, did I tell you? My oldest daughter created it in PowerPoint last night after dinner! She’s taking a class. She printed it out and use a gluestick to add some glitter where we want the paint to go. Isn’t she talented?”

You might have to take something for that migraine or go lay down in a dark room.

Rush Order Randy just left. He needs fifty packable jackets embroidered by Friday for a big annual event. The entire time he’s in your office he’s been on his cell phone typing, so you had to repeat yourself a few times to get the order placed. Your art team stayed a little late to get the file created and sent out, but you had to follow up with Randy twice to get him to approve it. The jackets come in, but not all at once as the distributor is out of mediums. They don’t show up until Thursday afternoon. Your printer stays late into the night to finish the job, so they are ready for pick-up on Friday. (Can you see the punchline coming?) Friday rolls around, but Randy never shows. In fact, despite numerous attempts at trying to reach him you can’t get him to respond at all. Weeks later those jackets are still sitting in your pick-up area. The order is unpaid because he wanted to see the jackets before charging them to his card. When you contact the group that sponsored the event to track down Randy, you find out that not only is Randy not in charge of the event, but another vendor supplied all the merchandise.

Ut oh.

Golden Egg Orders

I’m sure every shop has similar horror stories. Some may be incredibly worse. I just made these up to illustrate a point. When you appeal to everyone, that just might work.

Instead, let’s tinker with the notion of building your business with your favorite types of orders, with your favorite types of clients. You know, the ones you love running, make good money on, has a certain client profile, or just makes you feel good when you produce the job. It’s the best order that is a perfect fit for your shop.

Think about it. What’s yours?

Let’s call that type of order a “Golden Egg”. In Aesop’s fables, the goose that lays the golden egg was a prized commodity in the tale. For our shops, this type of order is a prized commodity too. Golden Egg orders are the ones we want to capture more of in our attempt to grow our business.

In our tales of misery outlined above, you don’t have to take those types of orders if you don’t want to. You can simply post policies or procedures in place to minimize the disruption they cause, or make that type of customer take their problem order somewhere else.

Target Your Effort

So instead of trying to appeal to everyone, what if you focused your effort into one type of Golden Egg order. For illustration purposes, let’s say your Golden Egg order is a 500 piece run that repeats at least twice a year.

So who typically orders those? Look up your past order history to determine the who, why and when for those types of orders in your shop. Take that information and branch out with other similar customers. Where are they? Don’t just think local. Go out one or two business days shipping from you. It could be a big area.

The great thing about defining the Golden Egg order is that this is going to give you direction and purpose in your social media marketing and sales efforts. Stop trying to appeal to everyone, and start building your strategies to appeal to the customers that you want in the future!

Replace Robert, Sally and Randy with customers that make sense.

Thanks for reading!

The post The Problem With Taking Anything appeared first on Ryonet Blog.

from Ryonet Blog http://blog.screenprinting.com/problem-taking-anything/ Come and check out Ryonet from Blogger http://lamurdis.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-problem-with-taking-anything.html

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orbemnews · 3 years

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The Small Business Administration’s Gaffes Are Now Her Job to Fix Isabella Casillas Guzman, President Biden’s choice to run the Small Business Administration, inherited a portfolio of nearly $1 trillion in emergency aid and an agency plagued by controversy when she took over in March. She has been sprinting from crisis to crisis ever since. Some new programs have been mired in delays and glitches, while the S.B.A.’s best-known pandemic relief effort, the Paycheck Protection Program, nearly ran out of money for its loans this month, confusing lenders and stranding millions of borrowers. Angry business owners have deluged the agency with criticism and complaints. Now, it’s Ms. Guzman’s job to turn the ship around. “It’s the largest S.B.A. portfolio we’ve ever had, and clearly there’s going to need to be some changes in how we do business,” she said in a recent interview. When the coronavirus crisis struck and the economy went into a free fall last year, Congress and the Trump administration pushed the Small Business Administration to the forefront, putting it in charge of huge sums of relief money and complicated new programs. It is by far the smallest cabinet-level agency, with an annual operating budget that is typically less than half of what the Defense Department spends in a day. It was long viewed within the government as a sleepy backwater. But when the pandemic sent unemployment claims soaring, Congress responded with an unprecedented plan: Give businesses money to keep their workers employed. Just seven days after President Donald J. Trump signed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in late March 2020, the Small Business Administration began accepting applications for the Paycheck Protection Program. Agency employees describe a blurry month of round-the-clock work to manage the program’s launch and early days. The agency’s 68 district offices, which normally field a few hundred inquiries a week, received 12,000 phone calls a day from desperate business owners. A rotating group of a dozen people camped in an ad hoc war room at the mostly empty headquarters to write the program’s rules and revamp technology systems to handle the onslaught of applications. Despite lots of speed bumps — including confusing, often-revised loan terms and several technical meltdowns — the program enjoyed some success. Millions of business owners credit it with helping them survive the pandemic and keep more workers employed. Economists are skeptical about whether the program’s results justify its huge cost, but Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden both embraced the effort as a centerpiece of their economic rescue plans. As the pandemic stretched on and the economy plunged into a recession, the Paycheck Protection Program morphed into the largest business bailout in American history. More than eight million companies got forgivable loans, totaling $788 billion — nearly as much money as the government spent on its three rounds of direct payments to taxpayers. But there were pitfalls, some of which will take years to unravel. Fraud is a major concern. Thousands of people took advantage of the rushed program’s minimal documentation requirements and sought illicit loans, according to prosecutors, to fund gambling sprees, Lamborghinis, luxury watches, an alpaca farm and a Medicare fraud scheme. The Justice Department has charged hundreds of people with stealing more than $440 million, and scores of federal investigations are active. (During her confirmation hearing, Ms. Guzman promised that she would “prioritize the reduction of fraud, waste and abuse.”) There were other problems. Female and minority business owners were disproportionately left out of the relief effort. A last-minute attempt by Mr. Biden to make the program more generous for solo business owners came too late to help many of them. This month, a new emergency popped up: The program ran short of money and abruptly closed to most new applicants. “There was no warning,” Toby Scammell, the chief executive of Womply, a company that helps borrowers get loans, said of the latest debacle. His company alone has more than 1.6 million applicants caught in limbo. The Paycheck Protection Program is far from the agency’s only challenge. It’s also managing a complex and evolving system of low-interest disaster loans of up to $500,000 and new grant funds, created by Congress, for two of the hardest-hit industries: the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant for live-event businesses and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. (The hotel industry is pushing for its own version.) Today in Business Updated May 25, 2021, 12:48 p.m. ET Each required the agency to create policies and technology systems from scratch. The venue program has been especially rocky. On its scheduled start day, in early April, the application system completely failed, leaving desperate applicants hitting refresh and relying on social media posts for information and updates. “I turned to my associate director and said, ‘I figured something like this would happen,’” said Chris Zacher, the executive director of Levitt Pavilion, a nonprofit performing arts center in Denver. The Small Business Administration revived the system three weeks later and has received 12,200 applications, but it does not anticipate awarding grants until late May. People lower in the tiered priority queue, including Mr. Zacher, fear that even if their claim is approved, they won’t see a check until June or July — a major hurdle for venues trying to plan their summer and fall seasons. “It’s maddening,” Mr. Zacher said. “A program that’s supposed to help save indie venues is putting us at a disadvantage because of all these delays.” Ms. Guzman, 51, hears those criticisms relentlessly — the response threads to her agency’s social media posts have turned into primal screams of pain. (“I SERIOUSLY CANNOT TAKE THIS WITH SBA ANY LONGER” is one of the milder replies.) She said she understood the urgency. “It’s definitely unprecedented — across the board, across the nation — and we are seeing multiple disasters at the same time,” she said. “The agency is highly focused on just still responding to disaster and implementing this relief as quickly as possible.” This is Ms. Guzman’s second tour at the Small Business Administration. When President Barack Obama picked Maria Contreras-Sweet in 2014 to take over the agency, Ms. Guzman went along as a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff. The women had met in the mid-1990s. Ms. Guzman, a California native with an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, was hired at 7Up/RC Bottling by Ms. Contreras-Sweet, an executive there. “I was always impressed with her ability to handle jobs with steep learning curves — she has a quick grasp of complex concepts,” Ms. Contreras-Sweet said. Ms. Guzman spent her first stint at the agency focused on traditional projects like its flagship lending program, which normally facilitates around $28 billion a year in loans. The time, the job is radically different. “We’re working closely to identify opportunities to build up a strong agency to meet this demand of scale,” she said. “The S.B.A. needs to be as entrepreneurial as the small businesses we serve. What I really, truly mean by that is that a more customer-first approach.” The agency is testing a new “community navigators” program, which will fund local organizations, including nonprofits and government groups, to work closely with businesses owned by people with disabilities or in underserved rural, minority and immigrant communities. It’s an expansion of a grass-roots effort by several nonprofits to get vulnerable businesses access to Paycheck Protection Program loans. Ms. Guzman said she was bullish about that effort and other agency priorities, like expanding Black and other minority entrepreneurs’ access to capital — but first, like the clients it serves, the Small Business Administration has to weather the pandemic. And to do that, it has to stop shooting itself in the foot. The much-awaited second attempt at opening the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant fund was preceded by one final debacle: The agency announced — and then, less than a day before the date, abandoned — a plan to open the first-come-first-served fund on a Saturday. For those seeking aid that has not yet arrived, the incident felt like yet another kick in the teeth. Ms. Guzman said she was aware of the need for her agency to overcome its limitations and rebuild its checkered reputation. “This is a pivotal moment in time where we can leverage the interest in small business to really deliver a remarkable agency to them,” she said. “I value being the voice for the 30 million small and innovative start-ups around the country. What I always say to my staff is that I want these businesses to feel like the giants that they are in our economy.” Source link Orbem News #Administrations #Business #Fix #Gaffes #Job #Small

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