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L.A. City Attorney Sues To Stop Medical Marijuana Delivery App

Only last month an app company in Los Angeles announced that it’d be expanding its liquor delivery service to include greener pastures, as it were, with a new medical marijuana delivery option. But the city’s attorney isn’t a fan of that plan, and is suing to stop the company from going green.

In the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior court, City Attorney Mike Feuer alleges that Nestdrop is a “flagrant attempt” to circumvent restrictions in Proposition D, the law that made medical marijuana legal last year, reports the Associated Press.

The Nestdrop app links customers with delivery services, and requires proof of a medical marijuana prescription before the drugs can be picked up from certain dispensaries and brought to the customer’s home.

But the lawsuit argues that Proposition D only allows for medical marijuana users to pick up the drug themselves, or assign a caregiver who’s allowed to do so on their behalf.

The city wants a judge to ban Nestdrop from setting up pot deliveries and fine its parent company $2,500 every day since Nov. 12, at the least.

The company’s co-founder said in a statement that they’ll be fighting the lawsuit, as patients who have a tough time getting around could use the help.

“Nestdrop is the technology platform that connects law-abiding medical marijuana patients with local dispensaries to receive the medication that they need in a safe and secure manner,” Michael Pycher said.

Though other apps in the L.A.-area also offer medical pot delivery, Nestdrop is the first the city has turned its beady eye on.

“This is the first (case), and those others are operating at their own peril,” said Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office.

LA city attorney sues to block pot delivery app [Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

New Coalition Steps Up To Fight “Mega Comcast” Merger As FCC Restarts Review Clock

Knight725

It’s the plot of a certain kind of action movie or video game that we’ve all seen and played a thousand times: the big bad robot/alien/lizard comes crashing into town and the only thing that will stop it is when an unlikely band of allies group up and save the world. If politics and business are a game, as so many participants seem to think, then now they are apparently one of that genre, as an unlikely band of allies is now grouping together under one banner to fight the Comcast/Time Warner Cable mega-merger.

Politico first reported on the new organization, the “Stop Mega Comcast Coaliton.” The coalition wants exactly what it says on the tin: to prevent Comcast from growing even larger by buying Timer Warner Cable.

The 15-member alliance includes media companies, consumer advocacy groups, and TV/telecom businesses. On the business side, Dish is the biggest headlining name. They are joined by trade groups representing mid-sized and rural communications companies, as well as some small ISPS.

In media, Glenn Beck’s cable network The Blaze is on board along with WeatherNation, a competitor to Comcast-backed The Weather Channel. So is the Writers Guild of America, which represents film and TV writers and has been vocal in opposing the merger.

Advocacy group Public Knowledge is also in the alliance, as are the Consumer Federation of America and Consumer Action. They are joined by the Parents’ Television Council and by groups representing diversity interests, musicians’ interests, and sports fans’ interests.

The group’s “manifesto” is a familiar refrain by now. Comcast, post-merger, will have both the ability and the incentive to behave in even more anticompetitive ways that harm businesses both up- and downstream, as well as potential direct competitors.

A merged Comcast/TWC would control not just too much of the pay-TV market, the coalition argues, but also far too large a share of the high-speed residential broadband market, which would allow them to shut out over-the-top services as well.

“This much power concentrated in a single entity would be frightening even for the most trustworthy of companies. And Comcast is definitely not that,” the coalition writes. “In fact, Comcast at its current size already has a well-established record of abusing its market power, ignoring merger conditions and providing historically bad service to its customers.”

The coalition lists what they deem to be the worst of Comcast’s “bad acts” on their site, and concludes: “These facts, along with Comcast’s long history of abusing its power and disregarding its legal obligations, provide ample grounds for the DOJ and the FCC to reject the deal. It is not a close call.”

As for the FCC, after a long break due to some fighting over confidentiality, the agency has restarted the clock on their merger review. The informal 180-day review period should now, barring further delays, wrap up in early March.

by Kate Cox via Consumerist

Entera2.0: Revista Espiral. Las TIC y la Educación Infantil

via Educación tecnológica http://ift.tt/1yl3SNP www.bscformacion.com

What Does It Cost To Open A New Taco Bell?

(Steve Mohundro)

Maybe you’ve been in that moment, chowing down on a chalupa and hating your job, thinking to yourself, “I should just open a Taco Bell and cash in on hungry suckers like me.” It’s not a bad thought, but making it a reality will cost you anywhere between $175,000 and $2.5 million.

This is according to Business Insider, which looked at the costs associated with becoming part of the Taco Bell family.

The cheapest route for someone looking to get into the Bell game is to try to buy an existing franchise, which you could snap up for as little as $175,000, but which could cost you more than a million dollars. Of course, if a franchisee is selling their business, you might want to question their reasons for wanting to unload their Bell, since the average TB brings in sales of at least $1.4 million per year.

Opening a new Taco Bell will run you anywhere from $1.2 million to $2.5 million. This includes construction costs (because you can’t run a full-fledged Bell out of the back of your 1980 Datsun) and the $45,000 franchise fee.

Regardless of whether you’re buying new or used, Taco Bell HQ asks that all potential franchisees have a net worth of at least $1.5 million, including $750,000 in liquid assets. So merely having the $175K to buy a used Bell in a run-down part of town won’t be enough to pass muster.

And after your Taco Bell is open and serving up Gorditas and Dorito-shell tacos, you’ll still need to pay out 5.5% of your gross sales every year to your corporate overlords.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Cruise Ship Diners Suspected Of Tossing Live Lobsters Overboard In Effort To Save Them

(sheridesabeemer)

So a Canadian lobster walks into an English bar– er, bay, and he kind of scuttles. Anyway, despite whatever punchline you might’ve been expecting, Canadian lobsters really are showing up in English waters, and not because they were in the mood for a 3,000-mile swim. No, the recent influx of foreign crustaceans is likely the fault of guilty diners crossing the Atlantic on cruise ships.

The Homarus Americanus species of lobster has been showing up in the pots of fishermen in Yorkshire, reports the Daily Mail, which is especially bad for the lobsters as they can’t breed with local species and likely won’t survive long in UK waters.

As for how they’re getting there, one theory experts are entertaining is that do-gooder cruise ship passengers are ordering live lobsters and then telling waiters to throw them overboard in a misguided attempt to save the creatures.

Some of the lobsters are showing up with their claws still bound with rubber bands, but that’s only one problem — they could be bringing disease with them, and even if they do mate with local species, their offspring will be infertile, a rep from a fishing industry group explains.

“We think the most likely route is that they are getting thrown overboard from cruise ships,” he said. “People buy lobster for dinner, feel sorry for it and ask the waiter to chuck it over. In the grand scheme of things that’s a very small level of re-introduction.”

If you’ve got the itch to become a lobster savior, it’s best you don’t bother, he adds.

“They won’t last much longer than if the passengers had eaten them for dinner.”

Canadian lobsters discovered off coast of YORKSHIRE: Experts blame cruise ship diners trying to ‘save’ animals by throwing them overboard [Daily Mail]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

JetBlue Refuses Boarding To YouTube Semi-Celebrity After He Unleashes Twitter Followers

One of the Tweets that ultimately led to JetBlue refusing to allow the passenger to board.

For better or worse, we live in an age where a new breed of Internet sorta-celebrity can threaten to unleash the power of their social media following on any person or business they don’t like. That’s what happened last week when a YouTube personality with several hundred thousand fans got upset about a fee for changing his JetBlue ticket. But after using his Twitter followers to hassle the airline, he found himself blocked from boarding his flight home.

According to Yahoo Travel, when the passenger asked for a refund of his non-refundable JetBlue ticket because he’d found a cheaper fare elsewhere, he was originally told he’d have to pay a $150 change fee and that the balance would remain as JetBlue credit, as per the airline’s policy for non-refundable tickets.

This apparently didn’t sit well with the man, who didn’t see why his non-refundable airfare couldn’t be refunded in full. JetBlue says it offered to reduce the fee to $100, but that this was not acceptable to the passenger. This is also when he allegedly threatened to unleash his 154,000 Twitter followers on the airline.

And he made good on that ultimatum, not only Tweeting about the airline, but singling out one employee and her employee number in multiple Tweets referencing the inexplicably still-popular Lindsay Lohan film Mean Girls .

Because the Internet loves to pile on, his followers then created their own Mean Girls-themed Tweets, also including the employee’s name and number.

JetBlue claims that some of these Tweets bordered on the threatening, and decided that the passenger should be interviewed when he arrived at the gate for his flight.

“We would never ban someone for their tweets,” a rep for the airline tells Yahoo. “But they wanted to assess if this situation had the potential to escalate in altitude.”

After speaking with him, the airline determined that he should not be allowed to board and was turned away from the gate and given a full refund.

“The decision to remove any customer from a flight is made after careful and informed decision by local airport officials and flight crew,” said the airline rep. “It’s based on an individual’s actions and our assessment whether further actions during the flight would lead to further disruption or non-compliance with crew member instructions which could lead to diversion and delays for all customers.”

As you might expect, this didn’t go over too well.

“I felt like JetBlue was beating me, you know why, because they could,” said the passenger, who ranted about the incident on, where else, YouTube:

“Nowhere did I physically threaten her at all,” he explains in the video. “I would never physically threaten anyone. They were fun tweets, I was upset with JetBlue, I was upset with Regina, and that’s all.”

As for allegations that the airline’s actions had anything to do with the passenger’s sexual orientation, JetBlue says that its “customers and crew members reflect an incredible spectrum of cultures, backgrounds, orientations, and beliefs,” and that it “would not discriminate against any protected class.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Takata First Investigated Reports Of Exploding Air Bags In 2003

(Listener42)

Airbag-maker Takata still will not issue a nationwide recall of all of its exploding, shrapnel-hurling car airbags, but the company has admitted (ahead of a Congressional investigation) that it has known about the issue and investigated possible problems with the airbag inflator since 2003.

A month ago, the New York Times shared that Takata employees had been performing secret tests of potentially problematic airbags back in 2004. The company’s official revelation that it has been working on this problem for more than a decade comes before Congressional hearings on the airbag issue start again today.

Reuters reports that company claims that the 2003 airbag issue, an airbag explosion in a BMW in Switzerland, was not related to the better-known defect that has now been directly linked to three motorist deaths. While engineers at a Takata facility in Michigan performed tests and allegedly sought a solution in case a recall really occurred, officials in the company’s home country of Japan were not aware of possible problems with airbags, or of the tests occurring in the United States.

Exclusive: Takata investigated defective air bag inflator as early as 2003 [Reuters]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Hershey Considering Replacing High-Fructose Corn Syrup With Sugar In Some Products

(Great Beyond)

While some products from Hershey already feature only sugar as a sweetener, like the original Hershey’s chocolate bar, the company says that as more customers are shying away from high-fructose corn syrup, Hershey is considering moving toward sugar for more products in the future.

The chief research and development officer at The Hershey Co. told the Associated Press that right now the company uses a mix of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, but now it’s “moving more toward sugar” in its products.

“We take into account what consumers want. And consumers are telling us between the two, they prefer sugar,” Will Papa told the AP.

Although there’s not enough evidence to prove that high-fructose corn syrup is any worse for people than regular sugar, some consumers say they avoid it over its reputation for boosting weight gain and diabetes.

Hershey said in a statement that right now it’s in the exploratory phase of possibly replacing corn syrup, a process that “is just under way.” Translation — if corn syrup is going away, Hershey can’t or won’t say when that’ll happen yet.

Right now, Almond Joy, Fifth Avenue, Take 5 and York all use corn syrup, while classic Hershey bars are made with sugar, a rep for the company explains.

“Our aim is to be transparent with our consumers about the ingredients we use in our products. Once we have more information to share, we will be back in touch,” Hershey said in a statement.

Hershey explores removal of corn syrup [Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Starbucks Offers Customers Chance To Win Free Coffee Every Day For Life (Actually, 30 Years)

(Kimaroo)

Because no one did it better than Willy Wonka, Starbucks is the latest company to promise customers something extra special hiding in their gift cards or mobile app transactions: These 14 golden tickets will win their bearers free Starbucks every day for life, or actually, one complimentary beverage or food item every day for 30 years.

“*Enter for a chance to win Starbucks for Life fulfilled as a daily credit for 30 years for one free food or beverage item redeemable at participating Starbucks® stores in the U.S. Starbucks® evening food and beverage menu items excluded,” the extra fine print reads on Starbucks’ site.

The Ultimate Starbucks contest’s estimated value rings in at around $54,000, reports USA Today, and kicked off Dec. 2 (that’s better than at Taco Bell, where a “lifetime” of food only costs $10,000).

There are only 14 Ultimate Starbucks cards waiting for winners, each with a retail value of $5,000 and made from 10K hammered gold. If you win, your name is engraved on the card so no one else can pose as you.

Customers earn chances to win by using Starbucks gift cards or mobile apps through January 5 to make transactions. After paying, you enter a 22-digit sweepstakes code from the receipt online to see if youv’e won.

“This is the first time we have ever offered customers something of this magnitude and what better way than to anchor it with our renowned Starbucks Card program,” said Sharon Rothstein, Starbucks executive vice president and global chief marketing officer, in a statement.

How to win free Starbucks for life (30 years) [USA Today]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist