I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that an estimated 100 billion single use plastic bags are thrown away every year. Harris Teeter has announced they plan to eliminate all single use plastic bags by 2025. After much research, I have determined that Harris Teeter has the flimsiest plastic bags in the Greensboro market. They say they are single use plastic bags and I think that one use is in getting the groceries out of the store and into your car. Since taking those groceries from your car to your house is a second use, you really can’t complain when the bottom falls out, which evidently is why they double bag everything heavier than a single tissue.

I’m sure the bags they use are flimsy because they are inexpensive, but if they had just a little more strength then the employees wouldn’t feel the need to double bag everything, which might mean that only 99 billion bags would be used in a year.

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Thirty years ago I was in the electrical vehicle business. The company didn’t make it for a number of reasons, but one was we didn’t know anything about manufacturing. However, I’m still interested in electric vehicles, which today means reading about the latest adventures of Tesla and Elon Musk. When I read that Tesla is manufacturing the new Tesla 3 in a tent, I couldn’t help but consider that in Greensboro to get a tent approved as a manufacturing facility would probably take longer than building a new building. In fact, in Greensboro, by the time a tent was approved as a manufacturing facility you could probably build a new building out of matchsticks.

Imagine if Musk was considering relocating Tesla, with its thousands of jobs, to Greensboro. Then, Musk informs city officials that because of his rapidly expanding business he may have to set up an assembly line in a tent. Would Greensboro completely change the way it does business or let the jobs go somewhere else?

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It’s yet another example of government employees looking out for each other first. If you are simply a taxpaying citizen in North Carolina and you needed to renew your driver’s license, or wanted to be the first on your block to have a REAL ID this summer, then unless you were extremely fortunate you found yourself waiting in line for hours.

However, if you happen to have been a state employee, you could have zipped right in, gotten your driver’s license or REAL ID and been out in minutes because the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles has an office only open to state employees. Isn’t that sweet.

Those of us who work in the private sector get to wait at the back of the line while those who work for the state government take care of each other.

The name for that is corruption. It’s not the kind of corruption that involves paying bribes or stealing money, but it is corruption for the government to use tax dollars to grant special favors to certain people. Where you work should not determine how long you wait in line at the DMV office.

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Greensboro tries to convince people that it is a happening city with pedal cars, rickshaws and fancy golf carts moving people around downtown. But the other Greensboro comes out when something like an electric scooter suddenly appears in the downtown. According to the way I read the laws, scooters aren’t allowed on the sidewalks downtown or on the streets, which pretty much eliminates riding them downtown unless you own your own parking lot.

I don’t see that electric scooters are any different from Segways except in the alignment of the wheels and the fact that the government likes Segways. But if you can ride a Segway on the sidewalk, and I see people doing it every day, why can’t you ride an electric scooter?

My guess is the City Council will decide it needs focus groups, the stakeholders will all need to be contacted, at least a dozen different committees appointed and some outside consultants hired with a goal of presented a plan for downtown scooters for the City Council to consider by December 2020.

Then again, the city could simply decide to allow scooters and add another mode of transportation downtown.

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Monday, I thought that instead of the News & Record in my driveway, I had one of those annoying flyers. But it turned out it was the N&R – all 20 pages of it. I don’t know if this is the smallest paper they’ve ever delivered, but it’s got to be close.