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World's Best-Run Pension Funds Say It's Time to Start Worrying BloombergEven in a city infamous for its traffic, the congestion at Los Angeles International Airport was growing dire.
Spurred by extensive construction, a surge in air travel and the arrival of Uber and Lyft, traffic volumes at the nation’s second-busiest airport rose by half over a decade, turning a drive through the 1.5-mile terminal area into a half-hour ordeal.
Without major changes, airport officials warned, traffic at LAX on an average summer day would soon resemble the bumper-to-bumper crawl on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
On Friday, city officials unveiled a plan aimed at reducing the congestion.
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Starting at the end of October, travelers leaving LAX will be required to board a shuttle or walk to a waiting area east of Terminal 1 to hail an Uber, Lyft or taxi. Drop-off policies, and pickups for family and friends, will not change.
The plan will remain in place until the completion of an elevated airport train, scheduled for 2023. The people-mover will arrive every two minutes and will whisk passengers between the terminals, a car rental facility, a ground transportation hub and a Metro station.
The sleek train and a $14-billion overhaul of the aging airport are major parts of L.A.’s efforts to improve transportation in traffic-choked Southern California before the 2028 Summer Olympics. Where pickups will occur after the people-mover opens is still unclear.
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The idea of transferring to a shuttle bus to catch a ride home has frustrated and dismayed many travelers, who say more schlepping will make LAX more stressful.
“It’ll be a lot less convenient, and it will probably take a lot longer to get home,” Kristi Nichols, 23, an engineer who travels frequently for work and to visit family, said at the airport Friday.
Starting next month, she said, she’ll try to get picked up by family or book a SuperShuttle instead.
Officials are asking travelers to give the new system a try. Frequent bus service and a well-organized pickup area may be more efficient than today’s crowded curbsides, they said, where riders can wait for a half-hour or more while Uber and Lyft drivers inch through traffic.
“You will no longer have to fight the traffic to get out of the central terminal area,” said Keith Wilschetz, deputy executive director of operations at Los Angeles World Airports. “Once you’re in your car, you’re right on Sepulveda.”
Uber and Lyft account for 27% of the 100,000 vehicles in the LAX terminal area on an average day, Wilschetz said. Taxis make up 4%. Shifting pickups to a parking lot will eliminate about 15% of the vehicles in the terminal, he said.
During the first half of 2019, LAX saw 10% more vehicle trips than in the same time period in 2016, the first full year that Uber and Lyft operated there. The number of Uber and Lyft trips soared 123% over that period, while taxi trips fell 39%, according to city data.
Meanwhile, ridership plummeted on high-occupancy buses and shuttles, data show. Trips on LAX’s FlyAway buses fell by two-thirds, as did rides on shared vans such as SuperShuttle and Prime Time. Courtesy shuttles to car rental facilities, parking lots and hotels saw a 20% decline.
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Passengers hoping to go home in an Uber or Lyft should order a ride as they pick up their bags, then board a shuttle on the lower level of the airport, Wilschetz said. Travelers looking for a cab should proceed directly to the waiting area, where there will be a taxi queue.
Curbside lanes on the arrivals level will be converted to bus-only lanes to speed travel times. Bright green shuttles are supposed to arrive every three to five minutes, and will make a maximum of two stops before going to the pickup lot.
The pickup area, at the corner of World Way and Sky Way, is a parking lot converted into a plaza with umbrellas, trash cans, bathrooms and phone charging stations. The area will offer food trucks that will operate from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Many travelers will form their first impression of L.A. based on the waiting area, Wilschetz said, so “we want it to be a good one.”
City airport officials in August awarded a $65.5-million contract to set up and maintain the lot, operate the passenger shuttles, direct traffic and offer customer service for travelers who are lost or frustrated.
Uber has some concerns with the plan, a spokesman said, and company officials hope LAX will “listen to and incorporate” input on how to improve the system. Lyft said the company has been “working closely” with the airport to reduce congestion and shorten wait times.
Drivers for both companies currently wait near the airport, in an area that some drivers call “the pig pen,” until they are assigned a rider. Matching with a passenger and fighting through terminal traffic to reach the curb can take up to an hour, and drivers are not paid for that time.
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“You should see Monday mornings,” said Lyft driver Jorge Ferran, 63. “It’s horrendous.”
If it works, the new system could help drivers pick up passengers more quickly, which would increase their earnings, said Harry Campbell, who publishes the Rideshare Guy website.
But that depends on whether passengers give the shuttles a try, he said. Already, he said, people are talking about being picked up by friends or family again, or trying buses that carry travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
“There’s a psychological barrier to having to take a shuttle to an Uber,” Campbell said. “It’s just a hassle.”
From the outside looking in, the talks between the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) striking members and the management of General Motors look like normal disagreements over pay. In reality, they’re really about the future of cars in the U.S.
UAW members’ anxieties and uncertainties are actually shared by GM GM, -0.20% and most other automakers, which know that it’s no longer a question of when internal combustion engine cars will be replaced by electric vehicles, but how quickly the changeover will take place.
The shift to electric means a fundamental transformation of what workers will do and how many are needed to do it.
Electric cars have far fewer parts, which means far fewer people are needed to put them together. When one analyst took apart a Chevrolet Bolt and Volkswagen Golf, he found that the Golf had 125 more moving parts than its electric counterpart. What’s more, the electric vehicles’ parts are often easier to put in place using automated machines. The UAW’s own estimates that the move to electrification may cost 35,000 members to lose their jobs may not be the most scientific study ever done, but it’s also probably not far off.
GM has attempted to appease the UAW with specific promises, including the construction of an electric battery plant in one of the Ohio cities hit hardest by recent factory closings. But even this tactic has only confirmed the UAW’s worst fears: The battery plant won’t need as many workers, and GM would prefer to pay them less than what other workers make at plants that require more complicated assembly.
None of this is anyone’s fault. GM is trying to respond to a global trend that it needs to follow in order to stay relevant. The UAW is trying to protect its members. But it’s crucial that the parties work together, because they collectively represent a part of the American automotive industry that’s falling behind its global competition.
Take the year 2023, for example. The UAW and GM are negotiating a four-year contract that will expire then. Meanwhile, in Germany this week, the first hearings were held in a class-action lawsuit brought by 450,000 consumers in that country against its largest automaker, Volkswagen, over the diesel emissions scandal. Legal experts believe that the lawsuit, like the UAW’s contract, will also find its resolution in 2023.
This matters because it’s one small example of the cultural differences between American automakers and the companies they’re competing against. In Germany, the people are pushing the automaker to move away from the traditional toward new technology. That push has no parallel here in the U.S.
Timeline projections differ, but many analysts and auto executives believe that EVs will become comparable or cheaper than internal combustion vehicles by the mid-2020s, and most agree that electric cars will begin to outsell conventional ones by 2030 or the mid-2030s. And most of that EV growth is happening in China and Europe, not in the United States.
Sales of EVs in China in 2018 were higher than the rest of the world combined, and the Chinese government has invested over $60 billion to shape an automotive industry fueled by electricity. In Europe, France and Germany recently announced a partnership to invest nearly $7 billion to develop EV batteries that solve the problem of limited range.
China and Europe are two different sides of the same coin. The Chinese auto market is so new that many of its consumers are about to purchase their first car, and its automakers have no legacy attachments to combustible engines. European automakers and consumers are in the opposite position, yet both, thanks in part to heavier regulations, have come to grips more quickly with the electric transition, invested more heavily in its future, and are therefore more prepared for change.
The United States has Tesla TSLA, -0.69%, far and away the market share leader in electric vehicles. But in nearly every other case, it lags far behind.
A resolution to the strike is probably imminent. That’s good news. Better news would be an increase in the amount of collaboration between the UAW and GM, and other American automakers and the workers they employ.
What looks like a fight for today is actually a fight for future American relevance. It would just make a lot more sense if the people that we need to compete globally were working together as a team, rather than fighting each other.
Daron Gifford leads Plante Moran’s automotive industry consulting services.
Some 1,200 miles south of Detroit, several thousand UAW workers in Texas are intently watching daily for any news from the Renaissance Center.
Negotiators for the UAW and General Motors have been holed up in the RenCen in bargaining discussions since GM's contract with the union expired on Sept. 14. That prompted about 46,000 union members to go on strike nationwide against GM two days later.
Those strikers include nearly 5,000 workers at GM's Arlington Assembly plant in Texas.
“I haven’t heard anybody say, 'Let’s go back to work,'" said Mike Cartwright, a union worker at the plant. "They want to get back to work, but they want to hear from the bargaining table that they have an agreement.”
On Friday, Terry Dittes, the UAW's lead negotiator with GM, told strikers the two sides had made "good progress regarding the issues of health care and a path for temporary employees becoming seniority members." Work remained, he said, on wages, job security and other matters — though temp workers and health care are known to be key issues.
Some analysts estimate the strike has cost GM about $1 billion so far, while workers are getting only their UAW strike pay of $250 a week.
More: GM can withstand losses of UAW strike — because of what it stands to gain
More: UAW rejects GM's latest offer, tells members it 'came up short'
Nearly all of Arlington's 5,000 hourly workers belong to the UAW, remarkable considering that Texas has been a right-to-work state since 1941. That means that under the labor code, a person cannot be denied employment because of membership or nonmembership in a labor union or other labor organization.
Michigan is also a right-to-work state in recent years, but with a far deeper union history than Texas.
Labor leaders at Arlington say UAW members are committed to this strike.
"We were one of the plants with a higher percentage of members authorizing the UAW to go on strike," said Ken Hines, shop chairman at UAW Local 276. "Nobody wants to strike, but we felt it was necessarily to win back some of the concessions we gave during the bankruptcy period."
One of those was a cost-of-living-allowance that union members want reinstated, among other issues.
Hines said most strikers prefer to return to work, but are prepared for a long strike and will, "continue to sacrifice for as long as it takes.”
The union wants job security, higher wages and a pathway for temps to be hired permanently with better pay and benefits. GM wants to lower its costs, preferably with hiring more temporary workers.
The union also wants to protect its health care benefits, whereas GM has been said to want the union members to pay more than the 3% of total costs they pay now.
The two sides are at odds, which means Saturday is day 20 of the strike.
Hines, 50, made sure his members would be prepared for a long strike. Starting early last year, he would remind members at any union meetings to start saving their money.
“Because you never know what the future holds and we wanted to make sure our membership was prepared in case we went on strike," said Hines.
Hines has phone numbers for about 1,700 of his union members programmed in his cell phone, he said. He has text messaged about half of them since the strike started to check on their welfare.
"There are some who are struggling," Hines said. Those are usually the temporary workers who made less and did not get overtime to save up money.
Hines said he has directed them to food banks. Also, local residents and businesses have donated food, money and other items to the local union hall for those who need help.
Cartwright, 59, is OK financially to endure a strike. He was at those union meetings and remembers Hines saying, "Hey, remember contract time is coming up and we don’t know what to expect so save your money.’”
Cartwright has worked for GM for 34 years. He spent six years at GM's Fairfax Assembly and Stamping Plant in Kansas City, Kansas. The rest of his time has been at Arlington, a massive 5.75 million square-foot facility that sits on 250 acres right between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Arlington is the American Dream City, according to its official government website. GM's website said the plant churns out 1,200 of GM's most profitable vehicles daily: Chevrolet Tahoe, Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade full-size SUVs.
“We know we make a lot of money for the corporation here," said Cartwright.
Still, Hines and Cartwright said workers in Arlington want assurance that GM will invest in U.S. manufacturing and not stop assigning vehicles suddenly there, as GM did last fall at four other plants in the United States.
GM said it would indefinitely idle Detroit-Hamtramck, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, and a transmission plant in Warren and one in Baltimore. As part of its initial offer to the UAW, GM had offered up solutions to keep Detroit-Hamtramck running by building an electric pickup and grant a battery cell manufacturing facility to the Lordstown area. GM said it would invest $7 billion in U.S. manufacturing and create or retain 5,400 jobs.
More: Fate of GM Lordstown plant unresolved as contract talks linger: What could happen
More: GM promises UAW 5,400 jobs, $7B in US investment: What it means
Cartwright has lived through past strikes. In 2007, the UAW went on strike against GM for two days. Cartwright said the community was less supportive then, wondering why the workers were on strike.
But this time it's different. He said GM is "a great company" that pitches in with the UAW workers to do local charity.
"We do a lot of community work here and we have a connection with businesses and organizations, so we’re getting more support from the community this time," said Cartwright. "Now when we have issues we don’t have to explain them. People know what we’re about.”
Cartwright said there are 10 gates surrounding the facility in Arlington and every day each has about 10 picketers in front of them. Everyone does 4 hours a week picket duty and often union members in other industries show up to picket in solidarity with them.
The members also watch social media, their email and websites for any updated news on the strike.
"Our key issues are the pay on our benefits and the treatment of temporary workers," said Cartwright. "It’s about fairness. Most of us have been here for years, the temporary worker doesn’t affect us. But it’s about all of us and we want what’s fair. The mood is that everybody here understands that this is a process we have to go through and we have to support our leadership.”
For many at Arlington, it's their first time striking, said Cartwright. "They heard about past sacrifices, they now see and feel the sacrifices."
And in a right-to-work state, Cartwright said the strike will serve to "improve our membership and our ties.”
Contact Jamie L. LaReau: 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter.
Harbor Freight Tools is recalling about 1.1 million Gordon Folding Knives because they pose a safety risk.
According to the recall notice posted on the Consumer Product Safety Commission website, the knives' "locking mechanism can fail to engage on extension of the blade, posing a laceration hazard."
The recall comes after seven reports of the pocketknives failing to lock, which resulted in "six reports of laceration injuries, including four that required medical attention," the notice states.
The knives were sold between July 2008 through July 2019 at the Calabasas, California-based home improvement chain for about $5. The chain has more than 1,000 stores nationwide.
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The knife is stainless steel with black metal on the handle and five cutouts on each side of the handle, according to the recall notice. The knife measures about 3 inches and has a silver-colored metal belt clip attached to the back of the handle.
“China” is printed on one side and “Stainless Steel” is printed on the other side of the knife blade.
Consumers should stop using the recalled knives immediately and return them to a store for a "full refund in the form of a $5 store gift card plus sales tax."
For more information about the recall, call Harbor Freight at 800-444-3353 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. PT Monday through Friday or email recall@harborfreight.com.
Follow Kelly Tyko on Twitter: @KellyTyko
We stand at a hazy junction in cannabis business history.
Some Big Weed companies are so “eager to shake off the image of being high-end drug dealers,” as the New York Times recently put it, that their CEOs won’t even cop to sampling their own products. But others in the industry—including six CEOs who spoke to Quartz at Work—will gladly tell you how and why they consume cannabis products, sometimes at the office, perhaps multiple times per day.
The latter bunch are not being reckless with their corporate reputations. They run small to medium-sized companies in one of 11 US states, or in the capital district, where recreational marijuana is legal and cannabis is routinely compared to everyday “drugs” like caffeine or alcohol. As representatives of the modern cannabis sector, touting health and wellness, they’re eager to cast cannabis as a normal aid in daily life, including life at work.
We asked for the details of their habits, hoping to get a sense of how and why people might use cannabis in the workplace. Their answers are below. But first, a couple of caveats.
The CEOs we spoke to all stressed that people respond differently to marijuana, so their own experiences with cannabis shouldn’t be read as a claim or promise of what a product can do for you or for a particular health concern. Secondly, many of the people we spoke to are CBD believers, even though studies can’t really prove either way that this non-psychoactive chemical compound in cannabis (CBD stands for cannabidiol) has any of the benefits ascribed to it. For that matter, we also don’t know with certainty whether THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the main active ingredient in marijuana, which is intoxicating, can work all the magic that’s attributed to it, like heightened creativity. Scientific studies are still catching up with all of this.
Finally, we’re likewise waiting for science to explain the vaping-related lung illnesses and deaths that have been reported across the US since late summer. Officials in several states have issued advisories urging people not to vape at all, even with legal cannabis products. Nevertheless, a few of our interviewees say they continue to vape, feeling safe about the quality of the products they’re buying; they argue that the crisis illustrates why cannabis should be legalized federally and therefore regulated and inspected.
Max Simon, CEO of Green Flower, a California-based cannabis education and training platform, says he’s a daily consumer of the plant’s extract. Every morning before work and again right after lunch, he takes 3-5 mg of a pure THC tincture that also contains MCT (medium chain triglycerides) oil, and he microdoses with tinctures throughout the day.
“I use cannabis specifically to treat ADD, which has been a real problem for most of my life, and for which pharmaceuticals were a pretty poor solution,” he says. “Cannabis gives me the ability to focus and be present in a way that nothing else in my whole life has ever been capable of doing.” But while he feels THC keeps his ADD in check without any negative side-effects, CBD triggers it.
For his staff of 17 people, he has a loose policy. “It would be hypocritical of me, quite frankly, to use old practices of thinking in the workplace when it comes to cannabis, when I am using it as a performance enhancer on a daily basis,” he says. His approach: “We instruct people on responsible care, we support people in getting educated, and then we hold very high standards from a culture perspective of what we’re looking to accomplish.”
People are measured according to metrics and goals they set for their personal projects “and if cannabis is helping them there, then we’re in full support of that,” he says. “If anything is a hindrance to that, that has nothing to do with cannabis; that has to do with their performance as an employee.”
As the chief executive of Canna Provisions, a retail dispensary in Lee, Massachusetts, Meg Sanders is a pot abstainer during the work day. “I need to maintain my wits about me,” she says, explaining that in her highly regulated business, there’s a constant need to crunch numbers and track inventory. But even outside of work she’s careful, because, as the head of a startup, she says, “your day is never really over.”
But dispensaries like hers also sell THC-free products, like patches or topical creams that contain CBD. A few of these potions will combine tiny amounts of THC with larger doses of CBD, specifically to treat pain or anxiety. “They don’t get in the way of thinking or doing your day job,” says Sanders. “And they are something that I definitely use, especially after long days on your feet in retail. You know, my back hurts, my feet hurt…”
On nights at home when she’s been “running really hard” and needs restorative sleep, she sprays a nano tincture with a 1:1 ratio of THC to CBD under her tongue, for a total of 2.5 milligrams of cannabis. Or she might vape or smoke a pre-roll (a joint that’s sold packed and ready to smoke) of the shop’s Death Star strain and “sleep through the night.”
Cannabis consumption by staff is banned during business hours, unless someone has a medical prescription. But the shop sells cannabis to people who are at least partly motivated by professional ambitions: Artists, chefs, and musicians of the Berkshires—which is teeming with creative types—tell staff that cannabis inspires them and, says Sanders, “helps them be better at their craft.”
Ricardo Baca was the first US journalist to cover marijuana full-time when he took on that beat for the The Denver Post in 2013. Three years later, after 20 years as a reporter, he switched sides, launching Grasslands, a PR agency of 11 full-time workers.
Cannabis, he says, now helps him deal with things he had been shielded from in his former career, like budgets and profit and loss sheets—which are now sources of anxiety for him.
“Every morning I start with a couple of different multi-cannabinoid complexes. I think of them as vitamins,” he says. One is a “straightforward derived CBD capsule” with a few other cannabinoids. “It takes care of any of the cobwebs that I wake up with,” he says.
Then he takes a small bottle of tincture that’s “really loaded”—with more than 1,000 milligrams of cannabinoids, many of which are CBD, but also some rare cannabinoids, or “emerging cannabinoids,” like CBN, or cannabinol, a mildly psychoactive component. (CBD products are frequently said to work best when they contain a full spectrum of cannabinoids, which produces something called “the entourage effect,” a boost of medicinal power as the cannabinoids work in synergy. But not everyone buys this claim.)
This morning regimen, with its “minuscule amount of THC,” has allowed him to cut down on coffee, and he believes it has improved his productivity. “I know I’m going to be working 10 to 12 hours no matter what, and if I am not in a good place that morning, then that could really send a destructive domino effect down the course of my day.”
Baca avoids “THC-forward cannabis” during the workday. That’s a creature comfort of home, where cannabis helps him to disconnect from business pressures and settle in at home with his wife, dogs, and cat. Still, the staff can expect some late evening texts with ideas that range from ridiculous to fantastic. After one pot-inspired evening message, the staff began reading poems to kick off Monday staff meetings.
Baca’s team will sometimes invite journalists or collaborators over to the office for a late-afternoon happy hour and mingle, too. On the table, says Baca, they’ll have beers, and everything weed, including vaporizers, a dab ring, and “flower” (buds of an actual marijuana plant) for rolling. Cannabis functions as a “great equalizer,” says Baca.
And when a client visits and invites him to “a sesh,” Baca doesn’t decline. Maybe they grew the flower themselves and extracted the oil, he says, which makes it hard to refuse.
He recalls one client bringing some novel technology that demanded a demo. “That day I definitely found myself in my office loading bowls at like 11:30 am with my client, and after a couple of hits, I will tell you, I was flying high and feeling great and definitely recognizing that I should not be doing any specific tactical, client-facing work for the next hour.”
Whitney Beatty, founder and CEO of Apothecarry, in Los Angeles, was a television executive before she launched her business selling attractive cannabis containers as home decor, in 2015. (She thought to herself at the time: Why do we store expensive liquor in a cabinet and high-end weed in a shoebox?) She had avoided cannabis her whole life, she has explained in interviews, until she was diagnosed with anxiety as an adult. Now, she tells Quartz at Work, “Cannabis has become a critical part of the way I’m able to operate.”
To be sure, she’s mostly referring to CBD. “I’m around a lot of cannabis and I want to be clear-headed making decisions with employees,” she says. Besides, because there’s a risk that THC will trigger her anxiety, Beatty sticks to products she knows even at semi-social work functions. For “cannabis-centric” events, she packs her own pre-rolls that have a higher ratio of CBD.
“I’m reticent to make people think that everyone who is in the business is consuming cannabis all the time. I don’t want to put that out into the atmosphere,” she says, “but there is a lot of consumption that happens at conferences of all types—medical, recreational, and everything in between.”
She tends not to be the person who takes everything that’s passed around the circle. But on workdays, she has a CBD vape pen on her person at all times, and she even stashes one in her car’s cup holder to keep her centered in LA’s legendarily anxiety-inducing traffic.
Mornings, she adds to her coffee a tincture with an 18:1 ratio of CBD to THC, with the THC present just for the entourage effect, she explains. “It helps to keep me calm and centered when the shit hits the fan,” she says, “as it always does when you’re in a startup.”
Alison Gordon, CEO of 48North Cannabis Corp., a producer and distributor of cannabis products in Toronto, has been using marijuana since she was 15 years old. But she hasn’t built up a tolerance (something she tells us she has heard a lot of women say). So, with more than 100 people relying on her to keep the lights on, indulging in even the slightest puff on the job is totally out of the question for her—even in Canada, where recreational marijuana is legal across the country and tightly regulated.
But not consuming after hours would be absurd, she says. “The way that I work, and lead a company, it very much has to be something that I understand at every level.”
During the day, she’s dealing with bankers and going on road shows, feeling removed from the point of it all. When she’s smoking marijuana at off-sites with staff or at home in the evenings, though, “it’s like I’m a consumer again,” she says. “And so I can sort of come back to, ‘Wait a minute, what is this product? What does this product do? What do people want from this product?'”
Though the cannabis industry has churned out cannabis in a wide array of materials forms, she sticks to joints—her go-to is a strain is one that’s said to be calming—explaining, “I’m old school.”
Amanda Jones, co-founder of Kikoko, a cannabis-infused tea company, recently conceived of a clever concept for a marketing campaign for the brand’s new honey shots. She envisioned a monochromatic photo shoot: “Everyone was wearing yellow. The furniture was yellow, the cups—everything.”
The outdoor shoot, in a field of yellow, turned out beautifully, she says. And for that, she partly credits one of her products, Sympa-tea, a brew of turmeric, ginger, black pepper, 3 mg of THC, and 20 mg of CBD. It’s marketed “for pain and anxiety” on Kikoko’s website, but Jones claims it’s the right amount of THC for her to feel creative.
Just to be clear, Jones drank that cup of tea at home in the evening. During business hours, a single milligram of cannabis is her limit, and at the workplace itself, she says, “We have to be careful.” Then she adds, “But I work from home most of the time.”
Some nights she dials up the THC, believing the high enables even more uninhibited thinking. “Let’s say at six o’clock at night,” she says, “I will take around six or seven milligrams of THC,” in one of the company’s stronger brews, Sensuali-tea. “I may not be as focused, but I do come up with some really wonderful brainstorming ideas.”
That tea is meant for “passion and play,” and was blended as a libido booster. “It frees the mind a little bit so that it makes sex better,” Jones claims, “but it also makes ideation and conversation deeper and more fulfilling.”
In after-hours meetings with her co-founder Jennifer Chapin, they may go up to their 10 mg THC tea for problem solving, though they tend to cut themselves off at half a cup.
Jones advises anyone considering a little cannabis helper to start small, because you could always do more. “I probably wouldn’t encourage going straight out and doing seven milligrams of THC at work,” she says. “That could be bad.”
Today, October 4, is National Taco Day. Like all made-up food-related holidays, that means you can score some great discounts on tacos today from a pretty wide range of places.
We’ve rounded up some of the best deals from national chains, but if you have a local favorite in your town it’s always worth checking to see if they have a bargain going on as well. And if you know about a superior deal that we missed, let us know in the comments.
Taco Bell will be offering “gift sets” in honor of National Taco Day. The packs will include four tacos: two crunchy and two nacho cheese. It’s also offering a way for you to send a digital gift card for $5+tax to a friend in honor of the day to cover the cost of their taco gift set.
Applebees locations in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and New York that are owned by Doherty Enterprises will be offering the Chicken Wonton Taco appetizer for $1 for National Taco Day.
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Get a free taco of your choice on Friday with any purchase at Long John Silver’s.
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Chipotle isn’t offering a specific National Taco Day deal, but if you sign up for the company’s rewards program you can get free chips and guac after spending $5.
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Del Taco is offering two different offers for National Taco Day when you download its app: a free Del Taco with any purchase, and a free Beyond Taco (using the plant-based meat) with any app purchase.
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Jack in the Box is offering a free taco with any purchase for National Taco Day provided you’re signed up for the restaurant’s e-offers.
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