Aside from the obvious racial issues, because Obama drew so much support and interest among young people.
Growing up with Clinton and the Bushs being elected, I never saw the kind of interest among young people that Obama garnered - at least not at my schools. I have a number of under-18 family members in high school who not only followed Obama's progress through the election season but have continued to read about and comment about his speeches and proposals after the election.
Perhaps you feel that they have just been caught up in a cult of personality - but regardless, in my mind the point of showing this type of thing in school is to capitalize on a teachable moment. The pre-existing interest that kids have in Obama represents a perfect opportunity for educators to get them interested and involved in government and politics. It's the perfect thing to spark discussion, which can later grow into a discussion about some of the challenges that the Obama administration is facing, and what students think about the proposed solutions. Of course, one could have done this for any inauguration - but as I said, it's much more valuable if the kids are already interested and engaged.
Listen to the interview in context and see what you really think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXulbariRt8
It seems clear to me that it was a simple word slip after he and the interviewer kept switching between the words Muslim and Christian - it wasn't just something Obama threw out there.
Pandora is the only one I listen to - they do have itunes and amazon links and they also let you bookmark favorite artists and songs so you can come back and review them later, but I guess it isn't enough.
In my experience I try to keep a cap on my music spending by limiting impulse purchases. This means that even if I first heard a song/artist on pandora, I don't necessarily end up buying it from them - I wait until I am in the mood to buy music and then stock up. I'm not sure how many people like me there are out there, but I just can't afford to buy ever song I like on the radio right when I hear it - there's lots of crap out there that sounds good the first time you hear it, but quickly sours after you buy it.
It doesn't necessarily imply complex spirituality on the order of modern religion, but it means that the people who buried them saw them as something other than sacks of meat, that they felt some connection to people even after death - a trait which not all animals share.
That's one example - but I also offered the alternatives of using meat stock to extend the use of a single piece of meat or just eating less meat and more of something else each meal. The key point is that it is possible for a mainstream person to alter their meat consumption without becoming a vegan/vegetarian
Veganism and vegetarianism are certainly unusual for most people, but one can still try to "eat green" if they really want to by just eating less meat. These days I am experimenting with buying half as much meat as usual, but buying better quality cuts/dishes when I do eat it.
I just watched a presentation from TED where New York Times food journalist Mark Bittman said that the average American eats 1/2 pound of meat per day (3.5 pounds/week), which is twice the amount recommended by the USDA. He suggests Americans could try eating 1/2 - 1.5 pounds per week instead - which could mean eating smaller amounts of meat with each meal, or eating the same amount of meat on fewer occasions.
I experienced this when I lived in Asia for a year. Most of the meals I ate used vegetables, rice and eggs - big pieces of meat like burgers, BBQ and steaks were only eaten occasionally. But on the flip side, most of the vegetable and rice dishes were flavored with meat and fish broth or sauce, which gave meat flavor to each meal without actually including much meat.
I was dreaming up a whole post about the problems with plastic bags, but I think I'll take it a different way. Forget about saving the world, I don't use plastic bags because they are an inferior tool for the task.
I have several bags that I use for shopping, including: a messenger bag and a canvas tote (which I also use for carrying things generally) and three insulated bags specifically used for grocery shopping. I leave the grocery bags in the car so they are always ready. These bags are better because...
1) I've never had one break in the two years I've used them for shopping. That means since I've started using them I've never had to run into the street to catch rolling cans of tomato sauce, or wash spilled milk out of my driveway - things that both paper and plastic bags have left me doing.
2) The bags are more comfortable for my hands. If I have a heavy grocery load, it's nice to have a wide, padded handle instead of the narrow plastic that digs into my palms. I can even throw my messenger bag over my shoulder.
3) When I use the insulated bags for groceries I can feel just a little safer leaving cold things sit for a bit if I have to run some other errands, or if I go shopping using transit or my bike.
The fact that it's better for the environment and U.S. oil dependency is just icing on the cake. And if I forget my bags, or drop by the store unexpectedly - then I just go ahead and take the paper or plastic bags and use them as liners for my garbage cans.
In some ways you are right, bags are not that bad in the big scheme of things. If you had a choice of creating an alternative to petrol or an alternative to plastic bags - petrol would be the clear answer. But why force yourself into a false dichotomy? Just because something is not a huge problem does not mean it is not a problem. The Pacific Garbage Patch is a dramatic example of how small pieces of litter add up to a big problem.
The environmental issues we face today are the result of generations of incremental and seemingly insignificant choices made by billions of people - why should the solutions be any different? Choose paper because it's just a little bit better than plastic (or, find a way to compost biodegradable bags if you can - even lobby for a organic waste program in your city if you feel like going the extra mile), and if it fits your lifestyle choose reusable bags over paper or plastic because they are better for both you AND the environment.
Sure, but let's be realistic - if they were thrust into the modern world, with no knowledge of Spanish/Portuguese/English, no concept of money, land title or written law they would not be walking on Mars or curing cancer. They would be fighting with the loggers or moving to the favelas in Rio, and working shit jobs, begging or stealing. At least what they have now is a stable, functioning society, one which has kept them alive for thousands of years. I agree the protection is paternalistic, but unless there is a comprehensive social safety net for these kind of people, I don't see how bringing them into our world could be anything but cruel.
Morally, Perhaps you are right. I think in any stable, functional relationship the couple should agree to come to a joint decision about the fate of the child. But in matters of law we often have to make arbitrary lines. In this case someone has to have ultimate legal authority over the child - if children were able to grow outside of the mother, then it would make sense for both parents to have equal power over the child. But if the man has a veto on abortion then that sets up an unacceptable scenario of women's bodies being subject to a men's will - thus we are forced to give authority to the mother herself, which although not perfect is better than the alternative.
Care to share? AIDS can be passed through non-sexual means, but it's all about blood sharing. The only theories of primate-human transmission I have heard are people eating bushmeat or someone being bitten by a primate. I seriously doubt the kids eating teachers or teachers biting students are common enough evens to cause alarm.
Of course I can't say for sure that this is what happened, but yes, I do believe the government could get caught doing this kind of thing.
The U.S. government is not a monolithic entity, and some branches are better able to cover their tracks than others . If someone in the CIA wanted to spread propaganda, then I am sure they could do a much better job covering their tracks, but this is coming from a house of representatives address. There are hundreds of representatives and at least as many staffers working for them who might have an interest in spreading misinformation, but don't have the training to do it secretly.
I researched this matter a bit for a native american history class I had. Frankly, there are a lot of differences between our system and theirs. Their system was a loose confederacy of independent tribes/states, closer to the U.S. under the articles of confederation than to the U.S. since the constitution. The more interesting evidence is in the letters and dialogues among intellectuals at the time -
1. in America there were frequent meetings between Iroquois and colonial representatives, as they were a strong political force at the time, and people such as Franklin and Jefferson conversed about the confederacy with interest.
2. At one such meeting in 1744 an Iroquois representative named Canassantego suggested that the colonies should join into a confederacy. as one source quoted him - "We heartily recommend union...between you your brethren...We [The Iroquois] are a powerful confederacy; and, by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power."
3. Several european intellectuals wrote and pondered on the government of the Iroquois, and offered them up as proof that democratic societies could work.
I personally don't think it is fair to say that we "got the idea of a republic" from the Iroquois, because ultimately we modeled our system after European theories and examples. However I do think having a functioning republic on the border of the colonies might have served as a source of inspiration because it took abstract and academic European theory and made it into something tangible for the colonists.
1. Weren't all of our domesticated animals were once wild?
2. What about deer, wild birds, seafood? These aren't available in the supermarket, but they are still frequently hunted/caught. And the only reason we haven't hunted many exotic animals like elephants, whales, and rhinos to extinction is because there are laws and human militaries standing in the way.
Even if one makes such a dire assumption, that such different civilizations are doomed to conflict - how world the weaker side benefit from ignorance of the other's existence? Wouldn't the indigenous people of America/Australia have been better off if they had some kind of fore-warning about the marauding hordes of diseased europeans on horseback?
1. It sounds like this thing has a limited range and specialized charging station, meaning that it is not that useful if stolen.
2. TFA also says it has GPS tracking and requires credit card information to be on file when you rent it, making it quite different from the yellow bike program. It just sounds a lot like a streamlined car share service to me.
If I buy stock in a company selling at $10 per share, and if they continue to make the same profit year after year, then my share price will never go up very much and if I sell the stock I will only have the original $10 I invested with no gain - I might as well have put it in a savings account and received a small but consistent interest payment, or bought gold and buried it in my backyard/jk. Thus if a company cannot raise profits over time, investors will leave and seek other, faster growing companies.
It's not greed on the part of the executives (necessarily) it's the collective "greed" of the entire investment community, because there is always someone out there that wants to use their money to make more money, it's the whole point of a public stock market, to attract new investment with the promise of future pay-off.
The other option that I hadn't really understood until other posters pointed it out is that corporations with steady profits and no room to grow can take those profits and divide them among investors, attracting people with direct payments instead of their stock price. It's an interesting idea, but I don't really know what goes into making that decision or what the costs/benefits are from the company's perspective.
I don't know where you are riding the trains, around here I've never seen anyone get worse than a fine. One guy almost got in some trouble after he tried to trick the transit cop with a fake ticket, and proceeded to start a heated argument when she called him on it, but even he eventually just got a fine and a bruised ego.
It's not that English can't absorb the concepts of other cultures, it has done so in many many cases and will continue to do so. The problem is if the language and its associated cultural context are lost before their essential concepts are ever transmitted to a more enduring world language. Today language change can happen within a single generation - the parents speak one dying language and the kids are completely immersed in another for purely practical reasons - that is a pretty strong disconnect, and even ideas that could be transmitted under ideal conditions never get communicated.
Something this big is usually neither purely good or purely bad. Yes, it is a good thing that more people will be able to talk in a common language, and frankly it seems like a continuation of a long historical process of political, social, and cultural consolidation. On the other hand, anyone who has become truly fluent in another language knows that they are not just exact copies of each other - there are large and important concepts that cannot be so eloquently or efficiently expressed in one language as they can in another. Languages reflect their cultures, and if some culture has developed a unique social, spiritual, or even technological concept it may be lost in the transition to an alien language.
Just look at the way that eastern and western spirituality complement each other, and the way in which collectivist and individualist societies can each inform each other's social and political philosophies. Even look at the way that the Australian scientists have reached out to indigenous australians to learn their knowledge of local climate patterns which pre-date colonization. Sure,there is a lot to gain from an interconnected world, but we can't pretend there is nothing to lose.
And as always must be pointed out when people bring up this argument, one need look no further than South Korea to prove that it is possible if you can find the right audience. There are entire channels devoted to single games - people even show up to watch those tournaments live! Once I was passing by one of the matches being filmed in a mall plaza - there were dozens of people straining to watch the computer screens over the gamers shoulders. I doubt it could achieve that level of mass-appeal in the U.S., but I think there is a sizable subset of the population that could become interested.
Besides, you can still hang out, swill beer and even make bets on the outcome of a Starcraft match. I've seen it done.
I think it is far more likely that such a program would be adopted voluntarily. For instance stores could offer incesntives to chipped customers - give them a 10% discount, or design special speedy checkout lanes. They wouldn't get all of their customers this way, but they could probably get most of them to participate. Perhaps retailers could get together and design some sort of 'consumer chip' that could identify with multiple 'rewards programs'. We love our freedom in the U.S., if we do get dragged into a fascist style society, it will be with the illusion of greater freedom. "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag.- Huey Long"
I can understand your resistance to the police officer, it was totally uncalled for of him to ask for your license in this situation, but I'm afraid I still don't understand why you didn't show the store recipt, I just don't see the violation. That said, the managers' response was silly and the demands of the police officer were clearly excessive, so I do wish you luck in your fight.
I've had it happen, though only once in my own country. I arrived at the LA airport with a ton of luggage after a long trip, and I think the cabbie thought I was a new arrival by the way he was talking to me. I was clearly tired after a trans-pacific flight, and ready to fall asleep the moment I hit the seat, and I think he wanted to take advantage of that. I started to doze off, but couldn't help but notice that he was about to enter the freeway heading exactly the opposite direction of my house. I then woke up and told him to turn around, but even once we were heading the right direction he tried to make a million little pointless detours. As we got nearer I had to resort to giving him turn-by-turn directions, and when we got to my neighborhood he drove in a huge circle around a large park and school, missing two or three perfectly good turns. I've never paid more than $20 for a trip from the airport, even with bad traffic, but he had somehow driven it up to more than $30 with very little traffic.
When he finally stopped, I got my luggage out on the sidewalk before paying him, and handed him a $20 bill without saying a word, but gave him a hard glare, praying inside that this would not turn into a scene. Thankfully he accepted it and drove away. I have paid much better attention to all my cabbies since then, but so far so good.
Agreed, they obviously should have done this from the start. But a lot of companies would whine, pout, and be stubborn about their decision. Google is not only changing their mind, but they are doing it quickly and they are giving a bonus by letting people keep the google credit they already gave and extending the subscriptions. They even publicly admit that it was (or at least appeared to be, in their words) a self serving action. Considering the behavior of companies these days, that all seems like pretty good customer service to me.
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Aside from the obvious racial issues, because Obama drew so much support and interest among young people.
Growing up with Clinton and the Bushs being elected, I never saw the kind of interest among young people that Obama garnered - at least not at my schools. I have a number of under-18 family members in high school who not only followed Obama's progress through the election season but have continued to read about and comment about his speeches and proposals after the election.
Perhaps you feel that they have just been caught up in a cult of personality - but regardless, in my mind the point of showing this type of thing in school is to capitalize on a teachable moment. The pre-existing interest that kids have in Obama represents a perfect opportunity for educators to get them interested and involved in government and politics. It's the perfect thing to spark discussion, which can later grow into a discussion about some of the challenges that the Obama administration is facing, and what students think about the proposed solutions. Of course, one could have done this for any inauguration - but as I said, it's much more valuable if the kids are already interested and engaged.
Listen to the interview in context and see what you really think. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXulbariRt8 It seems clear to me that it was a simple word slip after he and the interviewer kept switching between the words Muslim and Christian - it wasn't just something Obama threw out there.
Pandora is the only one I listen to - they do have itunes and amazon links and they also let you bookmark favorite artists and songs so you can come back and review them later, but I guess it isn't enough.
In my experience I try to keep a cap on my music spending by limiting impulse purchases. This means that even if I first heard a song/artist on pandora, I don't necessarily end up buying it from them - I wait until I am in the mood to buy music and then stock up. I'm not sure how many people like me there are out there, but I just can't afford to buy ever song I like on the radio right when I hear it - there's lots of crap out there that sounds good the first time you hear it, but quickly sours after you buy it.
It doesn't necessarily imply complex spirituality on the order of modern religion, but it means that the people who buried them saw them as something other than sacks of meat, that they felt some connection to people even after death - a trait which not all animals share.
That's one example - but I also offered the alternatives of using meat stock to extend the use of a single piece of meat or just eating less meat and more of something else each meal. The key point is that it is possible for a mainstream person to alter their meat consumption without becoming a vegan/vegetarian
Veganism and vegetarianism are certainly unusual for most people, but one can still try to "eat green" if they really want to by just eating less meat. These days I am experimenting with buying half as much meat as usual, but buying better quality cuts/dishes when I do eat it.
I just watched a presentation from TED where New York Times food journalist Mark Bittman said that the average American eats 1/2 pound of meat per day (3.5 pounds/week), which is twice the amount recommended by the USDA. He suggests Americans could try eating 1/2 - 1.5 pounds per week instead - which could mean eating smaller amounts of meat with each meal, or eating the same amount of meat on fewer occasions.
I experienced this when I lived in Asia for a year. Most of the meals I ate used vegetables, rice and eggs - big pieces of meat like burgers, BBQ and steaks were only eaten occasionally. But on the flip side, most of the vegetable and rice dishes were flavored with meat and fish broth or sauce, which gave meat flavor to each meal without actually including much meat.
I was dreaming up a whole post about the problems with plastic bags, but I think I'll take it a different way. Forget about saving the world, I don't use plastic bags because they are an inferior tool for the task.
I have several bags that I use for shopping, including: a messenger bag and a canvas tote (which I also use for carrying things generally) and three insulated bags specifically used for grocery shopping. I leave the grocery bags in the car so they are always ready. These bags are better because...
1) I've never had one break in the two years I've used them for shopping. That means since I've started using them I've never had to run into the street to catch rolling cans of tomato sauce, or wash spilled milk out of my driveway - things that both paper and plastic bags have left me doing.
2) The bags are more comfortable for my hands. If I have a heavy grocery load, it's nice to have a wide, padded handle instead of the narrow plastic that digs into my palms. I can even throw my messenger bag over my shoulder.
3) When I use the insulated bags for groceries I can feel just a little safer leaving cold things sit for a bit if I have to run some other errands, or if I go shopping using transit or my bike.
The fact that it's better for the environment and U.S. oil dependency is just icing on the cake. And if I forget my bags, or drop by the store unexpectedly - then I just go ahead and take the paper or plastic bags and use them as liners for my garbage cans.
In some ways you are right, bags are not that bad in the big scheme of things. If you had a choice of creating an alternative to petrol or an alternative to plastic bags - petrol would be the clear answer. But why force yourself into a false dichotomy? Just because something is not a huge problem does not mean it is not a problem. The Pacific Garbage Patch is a dramatic example of how small pieces of litter add up to a big problem.
The environmental issues we face today are the result of generations of incremental and seemingly insignificant choices made by billions of people - why should the solutions be any different? Choose paper because it's just a little bit better than plastic (or, find a way to compost biodegradable bags if you can - even lobby for a organic waste program in your city if you feel like going the extra mile), and if it fits your lifestyle choose reusable bags over paper or plastic because they are better for both you AND the environment.
Sure, but let's be realistic - if they were thrust into the modern world, with no knowledge of Spanish/Portuguese/English, no concept of money, land title or written law they would not be walking on Mars or curing cancer. They would be fighting with the loggers or moving to the favelas in Rio, and working shit jobs, begging or stealing. At least what they have now is a stable, functioning society, one which has kept them alive for thousands of years. I agree the protection is paternalistic, but unless there is a comprehensive social safety net for these kind of people, I don't see how bringing them into our world could be anything but cruel.
Morally, Perhaps you are right. I think in any stable, functional relationship the couple should agree to come to a joint decision about the fate of the child. But in matters of law we often have to make arbitrary lines. In this case someone has to have ultimate legal authority over the child - if children were able to grow outside of the mother, then it would make sense for both parents to have equal power over the child. But if the man has a veto on abortion then that sets up an unacceptable scenario of women's bodies being subject to a men's will - thus we are forced to give authority to the mother herself, which although not perfect is better than the alternative.
That was Michigan, not New Hampshire.
Care to share? AIDS can be passed through non-sexual means, but it's all about blood sharing. The only theories of primate-human transmission I have heard are people eating bushmeat or someone being bitten by a primate. I seriously doubt the kids eating teachers or teachers biting students are common enough evens to cause alarm.
Of course I can't say for sure that this is what happened, but yes, I do believe the government could get caught doing this kind of thing.
The U.S. government is not a monolithic entity, and some branches are better able to cover their tracks than others . If someone in the CIA wanted to spread propaganda, then I am sure they could do a much better job covering their tracks, but this is coming from a house of representatives address. There are hundreds of representatives and at least as many staffers working for them who might have an interest in spreading misinformation, but don't have the training to do it secretly.
I researched this matter a bit for a native american history class I had. Frankly, there are a lot of differences between our system and theirs. Their system was a loose confederacy of independent tribes/states, closer to the U.S. under the articles of confederation than to the U.S. since the constitution. The more interesting evidence is in the letters and dialogues among intellectuals at the time -
1. in America there were frequent meetings between Iroquois and colonial representatives, as they were a strong political force at the time, and people such as Franklin and Jefferson conversed about the confederacy with interest.
2. At one such meeting in 1744 an Iroquois representative named Canassantego suggested that the colonies should join into a confederacy. as one source quoted him - "We heartily recommend union...between you your brethren...We [The Iroquois] are a powerful confederacy; and, by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power."
3. Several european intellectuals wrote and pondered on the government of the Iroquois, and offered them up as proof that democratic societies could work.
I personally don't think it is fair to say that we "got the idea of a republic" from the Iroquois, because ultimately we modeled our system after European theories and examples. However I do think having a functioning republic on the border of the colonies might have served as a source of inspiration because it took abstract and academic European theory and made it into something tangible for the colonists.
1. Weren't all of our domesticated animals were once wild?
2. What about deer, wild birds, seafood? These aren't available in the supermarket, but they are still frequently hunted/caught. And the only reason we haven't hunted many exotic animals like elephants, whales, and rhinos to extinction is because there are laws and human militaries standing in the way.
Even if one makes such a dire assumption, that such different civilizations are doomed to conflict - how world the weaker side benefit from ignorance of the other's existence? Wouldn't the indigenous people of America/Australia have been better off if they had some kind of fore-warning about the marauding hordes of diseased europeans on horseback?
1. It sounds like this thing has a limited range and specialized charging station, meaning that it is not that useful if stolen.
2. TFA also says it has GPS tracking and requires credit card information to be on file when you rent it, making it quite different from the yellow bike program. It just sounds a lot like a streamlined car share service to me.
If I buy stock in a company selling at $10 per share, and if they continue to make the same profit year after year, then my share price will never go up very much and if I sell the stock I will only have the original $10 I invested with no gain - I might as well have put it in a savings account and received a small but consistent interest payment, or bought gold and buried it in my backyard /jk. Thus if a company cannot raise profits over time, investors will leave and seek other, faster growing companies.
It's not greed on the part of the executives (necessarily) it's the collective "greed" of the entire investment community, because there is always someone out there that wants to use their money to make more money, it's the whole point of a public stock market, to attract new investment with the promise of future pay-off.
The other option that I hadn't really understood until other posters pointed it out is that corporations with steady profits and no room to grow can take those profits and divide them among investors, attracting people with direct payments instead of their stock price. It's an interesting idea, but I don't really know what goes into making that decision or what the costs/benefits are from the company's perspective.
I don't know where you are riding the trains, around here I've never seen anyone get worse than a fine. One guy almost got in some trouble after he tried to trick the transit cop with a fake ticket, and proceeded to start a heated argument when she called him on it, but even he eventually just got a fine and a bruised ego.
It's not that English can't absorb the concepts of other cultures, it has done so in many many cases and will continue to do so. The problem is if the language and its associated cultural context are lost before their essential concepts are ever transmitted to a more enduring world language. Today language change can happen within a single generation - the parents speak one dying language and the kids are completely immersed in another for purely practical reasons - that is a pretty strong disconnect, and even ideas that could be transmitted under ideal conditions never get communicated.
Something this big is usually neither purely good or purely bad. Yes, it is a good thing that more people will be able to talk in a common language, and frankly it seems like a continuation of a long historical process of political, social, and cultural consolidation. On the other hand, anyone who has become truly fluent in another language knows that they are not just exact copies of each other - there are large and important concepts that cannot be so eloquently or efficiently expressed in one language as they can in another. Languages reflect their cultures, and if some culture has developed a unique social, spiritual, or even technological concept it may be lost in the transition to an alien language. Just look at the way that eastern and western spirituality complement each other, and the way in which collectivist and individualist societies can each inform each other's social and political philosophies. Even look at the way that the Australian scientists have reached out to indigenous australians to learn their knowledge of local climate patterns which pre-date colonization. Sure ,there is a lot to gain from an interconnected world, but we can't pretend there is nothing to lose.
And as always must be pointed out when people bring up this argument, one need look no further than South Korea to prove that it is possible if you can find the right audience. There are entire channels devoted to single games - people even show up to watch those tournaments live! Once I was passing by one of the matches being filmed in a mall plaza - there were dozens of people straining to watch the computer screens over the gamers shoulders. I doubt it could achieve that level of mass-appeal in the U.S., but I think there is a sizable subset of the population that could become interested.
Besides, you can still hang out, swill beer and even make bets on the outcome of a Starcraft match. I've seen it done.
I think it is far more likely that such a program would be adopted voluntarily. For instance stores could offer incesntives to chipped customers - give them a 10% discount, or design special speedy checkout lanes. They wouldn't get all of their customers this way, but they could probably get most of them to participate. Perhaps retailers could get together and design some sort of 'consumer chip' that could identify with multiple 'rewards programs'. We love our freedom in the U.S., if we do get dragged into a fascist style society, it will be with the illusion of greater freedom. "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag.- Huey Long"
I can understand your resistance to the police officer, it was totally uncalled for of him to ask for your license in this situation, but I'm afraid I still don't understand why you didn't show the store recipt, I just don't see the violation. That said, the managers' response was silly and the demands of the police officer were clearly excessive, so I do wish you luck in your fight.
I've had it happen, though only once in my own country. I arrived at the LA airport with a ton of luggage after a long trip, and I think the cabbie thought I was a new arrival by the way he was talking to me. I was clearly tired after a trans-pacific flight, and ready to fall asleep the moment I hit the seat, and I think he wanted to take advantage of that. I started to doze off, but couldn't help but notice that he was about to enter the freeway heading exactly the opposite direction of my house. I then woke up and told him to turn around, but even once we were heading the right direction he tried to make a million little pointless detours. As we got nearer I had to resort to giving him turn-by-turn directions, and when we got to my neighborhood he drove in a huge circle around a large park and school, missing two or three perfectly good turns. I've never paid more than $20 for a trip from the airport, even with bad traffic, but he had somehow driven it up to more than $30 with very little traffic. When he finally stopped, I got my luggage out on the sidewalk before paying him, and handed him a $20 bill without saying a word, but gave him a hard glare, praying inside that this would not turn into a scene. Thankfully he accepted it and drove away. I have paid much better attention to all my cabbies since then, but so far so good.
Agreed, they obviously should have done this from the start. But a lot of companies would whine, pout, and be stubborn about their decision. Google is not only changing their mind, but they are doing it quickly and they are giving a bonus by letting people keep the google credit they already gave and extending the subscriptions. They even publicly admit that it was (or at least appeared to be, in their words) a self serving action. Considering the behavior of companies these days, that all seems like pretty good customer service to me.