If Dan Dennett (and I) ruled the world

February 22, 2014 • 9:00 am

Professor Ceiling Cat is otherwise occupied today, and so posting will be light and limited to persiflage.

I don’t know if this is a regular feature of Prospect magazine, but it should be. Thursday’s issue published a short piece called “Daniel Dennett: If I ruled the world.” It’s a laundry list of what Dan would do if he could run everything. (He says nothing about enforcing compatibilism.) I’ll include just one of his Roolz:

I am not known for my modesty, and some may be surprised to learn that I really don’t think I have all the answers. Here, for instance, is one of my favourite ideas, but I am truly baffled about how to put it into action even with all the powers in the world at my disposal. As we all know—but sometimes forget, in our panic— when the plumbing has burst, the first step to take is to turn off the water main. In that spirit, I would like my first step on ascending to the dictatorship to be decreeing high quality, non-ideological education for boys and girls in every community on the globe. If we could just liberate the world’s children from illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition, their curiosity would lead them to solutions that were both locally informed and sensitive while also tuned to a fairly realistic view of the global context into which these solutions must fit. Once accomplished, the result of this universal education would be the opposite of paternalism, giving people everywhere maximum freedom to make informed choices about how to live their lives.

A great idea, but, as Dan admits, not workable:

The disastrous attempts to separate children from their families in the recent past in order to give them “proper” educations should convince us that there is simply no way of imposing an educational system on children in different cultures against their will and the will of their elders that isn’t both inhumane and ineffective. . . My reluctance to use my political power to educate the young is based on the begrudging opinion that resistance to such impositions is itself so intense that the effort is almost certain to be counterproductive.

He has another diktat as well, and one that even Sam Harris would agree with, but go over and see for yourself.

What would I do if I ran the world? Well, let’s leave aside Big Projects like the above, or forcing the North Korean government to disband and merge with the South (something much to be desired). My aims are smaller:

1.  Anybody with more then ten items in the “ten items or less” (and it should be “fewer,” not “less”) grocery checkout lane would be roundly excoriated, turned away, and sent to the end of another lane.  One item too many and you’re GONE! (Note: two bottles of soda count as two items.)

2. Speaking of which, anyone approaching the register in the checkout line who has not fully written out their check except for the amount (or who has not removed their wallet from their pocket or purse) would also be expelled from the line. In my world there will be no fumbling in change purses for pennies or dimes.

3. The price of lattes—the most overpriced non-alcoholic beverage on the market—would be capped at $2.00, even for a large one.

4.  No hotel could charge for wireless.

5. No airline could charge you to check a single bag so long as it’s not overweight.

6. If you had an appointment for a haircut, and had to wait more than 15 minutes past that time for your trim, the haircut would be free.

7. Cilantro would be banned from all restaurants as an inedible substance.

8. All bicyclists would obey the traffic laws, including stopping at stop signs.

9. No commenter on this website could ever use the words “I don’t mean to nitpick, but . . . “

Feel free to add what you’d change about the world, along the lines of the above. But please, no stuff like “I’d bring world peace.” That’s for Miss America contestants!

413 thoughts on “If Dan Dennett (and I) ruled the world”

  1. I suggest amending your fourth item with “… and the wifi would actually work.”

    (having just returned from a week with “free wifi” that worked just the same as “almost no wifi” works.)

    3. … and it would be free. For as long as you need to use it. Not just the first half hour then you start paying, like some cheapskate operators have it (I’m looking at you, Auckland Airport…)

  2. Brilliant! I will move to whatever country you are going to be president of.

    My only suggestion would be to change the haircut appointment rule to doctor appointment. They seem to be the worst offenders. Plus, I have to admit that I don’t have much hair left to cut.

  3. before wishing the North Koreans on the South – just consider:

    1. the relative per capita income is 1:15 (Germany 1:3 in 1989).

    2. the Germans spent 1.5 trillion $ to get where they are now, and it is not over yet.

    3. the skills of the North won’t be of any use in the south, so what you have is unemployable people.

    (Source: LANKOV – The real North Korea)

    1. At least allow free movement of people so that wives wouldn’t have to wait sixty years to see their husbands again and fathers wouldn’t have to wait sixty years to see theirs children for the first time.

      /@

        2. That appears to be beyond the powers of even Ceiling Cat to invoke. It will never happen in this universe. 🙁

  4. I don’t mean to nitpick, but diktat 7 is culinarily unconscionable. Not only is cilantro a delightful herb, it’s seeds produce the lovely spice coriander. Count me among the resistance.

    1. I thought cilantro was just what American people called coriander(after looking at wikipedia it is the Spanish word for coriander). The seeds being called coriander seeds. But that is how it is sold here in England. Wikipedia confirms this for me, I only spent about 5 minutes reading through it and have not done anything else. I’m always open to correction.

        1. I can confirm that coriander is a seed, as I ground up quite a few when I brewed a Belgian Wit beer last month.

        2. I think you are technically right in the seed vs herb department but in practice the two terms are interchangeable. Certainly in all Indian and Chinese grocery stores and restaurants in the Toronto area the greens are called coriander and our favorite Induan restaurant is Coriander Green. And absolutely, positively Dan Dennett is WRONG about corisnder/cilantro!! What would Mexican or Chinese or Indian food be without it ( and life would not be worth living without those cuisines – in my educated opinion).

          1. Whoops- apologies to Dan Dennett, whose views on cilantro are thusfar unknown. It seems to be Jerry who doesn’t like cilantro…and I thought he lived Mexican and Indian food???

        3. It is all coriander here, seeds and leaves, both of the same plant. Americans are special in using the Spanish name for the leaves and the English name for the seeds.

    2. My wife and I are very much with Jerry on this one.

      I like the spice coriander, but the same name is used for the greens in the UK, so it was very disappointing when I first ordered a dish with “coriander”.

      It now seems to be insanely widely used.

      I understand that there’s a genetic factor involved and it’s something you either love or hate the taste of. But given that people who dislike it dislike it so intensely, why inflict it on everyone?

      /@

      1. I think we have the makings of an arrangement here, Ant. If you’re willing to eschew the cilantro, my significant other and I will be more than delighted to eat your share. Does that seem fair to you?

    3. Cilantro/coriander is an abomination, it ruins everything it touches, banning it would be any responsible dictator’s first move.

      1. Ban ALL sauces, dressings, seasonings and flavoured slimes unless specifically requested or agreed to by the customer**. You can always add them afterwards but you cannot ever (successfully) scrape them off.

        ** I was going to add, “in writing, and witnessed by a justice of the peace or notary public” but that might be going a bit far.

      1. Yeah – really hate tail gating. Had a bike a few feet from my rear bumper yesterday – what did the guy imagine would happen, if I stepped on the brake? Hint: Anyone like raspberry jam?

        1. Have you ever had a bicyclist grab a hold of your car? Feels like you’re driving for two. Only had this happen a few times in NYC but apparently it’s quite common. At least they didn’t have a basket overflowing with cilantro else I’d have given them the shake pronto! 😉

      2. Where I come from that isn’t what “tail-gaiting” means. Here it refers to a type of picnic done in the parking lot of a sports stadium before a game. It generally involves bratwurst, hot dogs, hamburgers, and beer. Since I don’t eat meat or follow sports, I rarely attend. I can drink beer at home.

        1. What word or phrase do folks where you come from use to describe this particular vehicular activity and irresponsible behavior?

          2. After consulting with my wife I learn that “tailgating” can also refer to unwisely following another vehicle too close. But the “party” usage around here seems to predominate. After all, everybody around here (except me, I suppose) goes to tailgate parties before Brewers games but not everybody drives badly. 😉

          3. I live half the time in Massachusetts where everyone drives poorly. If you don’t, you cant progress anywhere.

      3. Oh no – let’s include them as well 😉 The only difference is intent — moral obligation vs running late. Both have safety issues. I do have sympathy for the poor sod that’s inadvertently ended up in the passing lane and too scared to shift over. The thing is, with the ‘enforcer’ you can always tell when they’re enjoying it — the greater the traffic jam behind them, the better. There is a smugness to their driving. The rear bumper is practically smiling, radiating gloat. They just need to be banned from driving in the passing lane.

        Now tailgaters, never having been one myself **looks up and around, away from laptop** (inadvertent tailgater of course), look like they’re clearly on a mission of another sort so I scooch through to get away — their front bumper is not smiling.

        I’m suddenly envisioning ‘enforcers’ driving in the passing lane with overflowing bunches of cilantro streaming out of the windows… yikes!

        1. In my city, city gov’t is putting in these larger, reasonably gently-curved speed bumps, for the purpose of “traffic calming.”

          One gentleman complained about such bumps being placed in the neighborhood through which he customarily drove en route to work. He didn’t live in that neighborhood, of course. He simply did not want to be inconvenienced.

          Also, of course, if he’s a father, he doesn’t want drivers not living in his own neighborhood to be driving fast through his own neighborhood.

          Yea, verily, NIMBY. Welcome to Amuricuh, the Land of Individualism and Self Interest.

        2. I don’t tailgate (usually), but anyone deliberately holding up traffic in the fast lane should be tailgated by a Mack truck. With reference to the ‘enforcer’, I once saw a bumper sticker that was a positive incitement to mayhem – it said “I may be slow, but I’m in front of you”.

      4. One of the first things the instructors at the BMW performance driving center (see photo) tell you is to leave a lot of space in front of your car (ie: don’t tail gate!) The related admonition (which, again, you can tell many drivers don’t do) is look as far ahead as you can (ie: texting is a bad idea!). If you ignore their advice and something bad happens just in front of you, you WILL hit it.

        1. Catching up on comments and I decree all will take private driving lessons with a professional driver at no cost (magic money), prior to issuing new or renewed licenses. Talk to abeastwod 😉 People will learn defensive driving techniques and other cool bits eg, how to effortlessly parallel park, recognizing distance between cars, basic physics… They will gain a healthy respect for the road and develop skills in the art of driving (it’s really cool). Inline skaters, cyclists, runners, walkers (nooo, not those 😉 will go through a training program as well.

          I took private driving lessons before getting my license and was married to an auto-x racer so we attended (I, the guest), weekend driving schools hosted by various auto clubs like BMW, SCCA… The experience of discovering what you don’t know and then learning new applicable skills is exhilarating.

          Meanwhile, beware the sanctimonious keeper in the far left/right ‘passing’ lane (depending on what country). I still stand by my ban!

          Now, let’s discuss “The Merge” and when to do it. Just kidding! Back to reading WEIT… the book. OH! I decree ALL read ‘the book’ and try wiggling their ears.

          Cheers!
          Andrea

      5. Laws requiring people to turn into the NEAREST lane should be rigorously enforced and tickets should be accompanied by excoriation.

    1. In the spirit of contemplating what is reasonable and appropriate, just congenially curious, is it OK to walk into a restaurant, one minute before closing time, and expect to be able to linger on the order of 1 1/2 to 2 hours?

        1. Of course, I hold your view. Possibly (Likely?), in a secret fit of reasonableness, a chain restaurant manager personally and occasionally holds that view. But will that be the view of some noble capitalist investor (always mindful of maximizing “return on investment”), who has never washed a plate from which he has been served (by “human resources”) and from which he has eaten, either in a restaurant or at home or in an executive dining room?

          Anyway, what noble soul came up with that old canard (shibboleth?), “The Customer Is Always Right”?

    2. Speaking of restaurants, they should be allowed to take only one reservation per table per night. Bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I hate going to dinner and being hurried by the staff, something too common in the US in particular. Fine if I just walk in and am forewarned that the table is reserved later at x o’clock, but if I make a reservation I expect that table to be mine for as long as I want it. Eating out is not just about shoveling food in one’s mouth. Also, bring the check only when the customer asks for it. Showing up with check in hand without being asked for it is just rude.

        2. I want to slap whoever came up with checking in with people constantly to ask how things are, are they finished with that, can I help you! I actually feel bad for the people who have to do it because they probably think it’s stupid too.

      2. ” . . . being hurried by the staff” . . . . .” (although they do want table turnover for the purpose of tip turnover, what with the $2.13/hr they are paid by the Scrooge corporation), the staff being hurried by the General Manager, the General Manager being hurried by the Area/Regional Manager, the Area Manager being hurried by the CEO, the CEO by the Board of Directors, the Board of Directors by the shareholders, seeking to maximize shareholder value, eh?

      3. You’re right about getting the bum’s rush, but unless you’re ready to fork over about 250% of what you usually pay, one seating per table per night is utterly unworkable.

  7. I usually agree with much of what PCC says, but in the case of cilantro, I must disagree wholeheartedly. I once made a recipe that called for 3 little pieces of saffron, and as I had no access to this I substituted a half-cup of cilantro. This was based on refrigeratorial availability and the shared sibilant names in the two spices, and resulted in one of my favorite dishes.
    My rules would include mandatory cilantro in every foodstuff.
    In PCC’s defense, I have heard similar complaints about cilantro (the world’s best spice) from other people, who often complain that it tastes like soap, something that baffles me.
    Is there a genetic component to cilantro distaste?
    Is cilantro embracement learned?
    Can I smoke cilantro like catnip?

    1. There actually is a genetic component to cilantro distaste.

      Similarly, some people find broccoli bitter.

      I would vote for it being served on the side so that people have a choice. L

      1. I agree, however that would then not be a “diktat”. Unless your rules include voting on things…

    2. Ancient Romans ate celantro, not parsley (check the pollen in the lakes). Most likely, parsley was introduced as a substitute in the Renaissance, when the Catholic Church imposed a divergence from the then prevalent Mediterranean/Islamic cuisine. It was done to demarcate itself even culinarily from the Infidels (undocumented – could be lore).

    4. 3 little threads of saffron = 1/2 cup cilantro?? That’s some creative substitution ( but I love it!!). Can’t really overdo the cilantro – or the chocolate – though usually not combined.

        1. My daughter feels the way you do about cilantro. My wife and I like it. I make my own vinagarette salad dressings and include it. We also sprinkle over steamed vegetables with minced garlic and fresh ground pepper.

      2. “Cilantro tastes like bar soap.”
        That’s it exactly! I’m curious to know what cilantro tastes like to those who like it. My wife loves cilantro and thinks I’m just picky. She doesn’t share my curiosity however, and remains uninterested in sprinkling freshly grated soap into her soup.

  8. Cilantro bans?! There’d be no Indian food! There seems to be a big movement to ban it though.

    Many might think I’d enforce a under TP orientation but I wouldn’t. I think there should be freedom of TP orientation and forcing it would only lead to oppression, sadness and ultimately rebellion. Here is the rest of my list:

    I would disallow the ordering of sandwiches or multiple, large orders that you need to write down to remember, in Tim Horton’s drive throughs. If you want something more than a donut or coffee, you need to go into the building to order.

    There would be a minimum speed limit created for all roadways and if trucks could not get up to this minimum limit while merging, they would be banned from highways.

    Cities would be obliged to remove really high snow banks that impede your ability to see oncoming traffic when you are pulling out from a side street.

    Bananas would be declared the best fruit ever.

    1. Most Mexican food too is heavy with cilantro.

      Correct TP orientation is enforced heavily in my house, by me. There is no rebellion only TP dictatorship.

    1. How about hip-hop “music” booming out of cars, disrupting reasonably-loud conversation within a 30-foot radius?

      I’ve noticed that Target (at least the one I’ve gone to) has stopped “blessing” customers with any sort of music, for which I am grateful.

  10. La philosophie triomphe des maux passés et à venir, mais les maux présents triomphent d’elle.

    François de La Rochefoucauld

  11. Number 7 is fightin’ words. I love cilantro and use it often.

    Now cauliflower, that is a whole ‘nother issue. And brown rice, which tastes like cardboard…

    Also, someone needs to resolve the right on red versus legal divided highway U-turn of those coming from the right.

  13. Proportional representation in government.

    Also some method to relatively quickly change a bureaucratic system to make it work more efficiently or effectively. No one seems to have the power to make needed large changes, so one is stuck with slow changes by committee that may be against the interests of the committee (eg. make it smaller or abolish it).

  14. I submit that rule 8 shouldn’t be so narrowly focused on bicycles, and instead should mandate that ALL users of public thoroughfares obey traffic laws.

      2. I don’t wish to be tendentious, and I apologize in advance to PCC for a potentially derailing reply. But I must observe that this point is not at all a given, even among the excellent and intelligent readership of this website. In this very thread it has been suggested that it should be OK to “nudge” pedestrians in parking lots, and that drivers who obey the speed limit on our highways are “sanctimonious.” Before singling out cyclists for special attention, I wish that motorists would first remove the log from their own collective eye.

        1. I agree that one should remove the log from his eye before complaining about the mote in the eye of another.

          That said, at least a few bicyclists aver that they should be able to run a stop sign if no one is coming.

          Do you agree, or disagree, with that?

          1. I agree, but with a qualification:

            It’s important to note that the potential for tragedy is much higher when one is at the wheel of a 3-ton motor vehicle than riding a 30-lb. bicycle. There were 34,000 traffic deaths in the US in 2012 (that’s roughly equivalent to a 9/11-scale event every month!), almost all at the hands of motorists. So while traffic signals apply to all users of public roads, I think motorists have a responsibility to be especially scrupulous in their observance of the law.

            Right now we live in such a car-centric culture that I believe the deck is inherently stacked against non-motorists. It follows that cyclists and pedestrians are justified in taking extraordinary measures for their own safety. If this involves ignoring a stop sign, jaywalking, etc. then I don’t see that as a double standard so much as a Thoreau-ian act of civil disobedience in the face of the enormous entrenched privilege that motorists enjoy.

            I own and operate cars, bikes, and a skateboard, in addition to being a walker and occasional jogger. My working philosophy is that the vehicle with the greatest kinetic energy must defer to other users of the roads. So trucks defer to cars, cars to bikes, and so on down the line.

          2. What do you think about pedestrians crossing against the red light/no crossing light?

            I saw a middle school male do so. He had to stop at the double yellow line in the middle of the road because of all the traffic against which he was imprudently crossing. Improvidently (at least in the middle schooler male’s eyes), a city policeman happened by, stopped, turned on his blue lights, and admonished him to go back to the curb to wait with the rest of his schoolmates until the light indicated it was the proper time to walk.

            Now, you may say that an ADULT would have had more sense and waited until a more providential time to cross against the light. Or would you say that it’s OK to cross against the light, in any event, as long as one can reasonably judge that there’s time to cross without worry of being hit?

            On the other hand, why should drivers have to worry about pedestrians potentially crossing against the light at every intersection? (I myself look for pedestrians at every intersections, understanding that at least a few have bad judgement about crossing against the light. Why can’t pedestrians simply wait until the “walk” sign lights up? Pedestrians certainly expect cars to stop at red lights, eh?

          3. First off, I want to reiterate my conviction that cars are obligated to defer to pedestrians at all times, for reasons that I have outlined above and that you haven’t responded to.

            To take on your specific example, I can imagine a case where a pedestrian would be justified in crossing the road against the “don’t walk” sign. Let’s say that a car and a pedestrian are both stopped at an intersection waiting for the light to change, and that the driver of the car intends to make a right turn in front of the pedestrian. The light turns green and the “walk” sign comes on simultaneously. The car turns right immediately, directly into the pedestrian’s right of way, with potentially fatal consequences. I assert that it would be safer for the pedestrian to cross the street against the “don’t walk” sign prior to the traffic light turning green, assuming that cross traffic allows this.

            I think it is easy and distracting to get caught up with hypotheticals demonstrating how other users of the road might be safer ignoring traffic signals intended for cars. My fundamental point remains that motorists are piloting lethal weapons that kill people every day. We are paying a high price for this deference to the convenience of drivers. Rather than nitpicking pedestrians and cyclists, I would rather see motorists held strictly accountable for following traffic laws, including obeying speed limits, yielding to other users, and avoiding distractions such as phones and car radios, to pick some obvious examples. It’s like Spider-Man says, with great power comes great responsibility, and right now cars are powerful not only in terms of the underlying physics but also the cultural concessions that we have afforded them.

          4. For Jay Lonner in response to me, as the “sub-thread” does not allow for further response immediately following him:

            The bottom line for me is this: everyone, pedestrian and driver, should WATCH what they are doing, and not act presumptuously and entitled. I am all for drivers taking the default Precautionary Principle position vis-à-vis pedestrians and bicyclists. Drivers should be grateful if they can get a tenth of that consideration in return, eh?!?

  16. Mandatory data recorder devices installed in all new models of cars to specifically monitor driving speed and frequency of lane changes. The data is to be checked periodically by car insurance companies, and factored in to determine the premium of an insurance policy.

    1. Great idea. You could make it more effective by transmitting violations to the cloud while they are occurring where the premium adjustment is instantly computed and shown graphically and numerically on the dashboard display.

      1. Ooh! I like that. I am especially thinking about certain young male driver of a Camaro who weaves aggressively across traffic, making me and other drivers hit our brakes.

        1. A motorcyclist dangerously did that to me one day. I laid down on my horn.

          Can you imagine the intensity of my satisfaction when a city patrolmen happened to be right behind us, and pulled this adolescent male child over?

  17. I perform guerrilla operations in support of TP under. Some day it will result in a clean wipe up. 😉

  18. About #1, “Ten items or less” is, in fact, fine. Among others, the new Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage supports that choice.

    Here’s the reasoning. Generally speaking, “less” goes with singular and “fewer” with plural noun phrases.

    Unlike water or the wind, groceries are easily and readily countable; but so are dollars, minutes, and degrees of temperature, and when we talk about a number representing a measure of those units, they take on singular characteristics: less than twenty dollars, less than ten minutes, less than 30 degrees, and less than ten items.

    2. “Generally speaking, “less” goes with singular and “fewer” with plural noun phrases.”

      Not really. Very simple rule: less goes with uncountable nouns, fewer with – you guessed – countable nouns. Hence, “less sugar” , but “fewer lumps of sugar”. It is not difficult, really.

      1. Actually, it’s not quite so simple as you think. When “count nouns” may be perceived as mass nouns, then “less” is fine. The history of the usage makes that plain. That’s why it’s a mistake to squawk about “10 items or less.”

        Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says this: “Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault — it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.”

        Also:

        “The idea that less can’t be used with count nouns isn’t well supported; it’s a rule that hasn’t ever been strictly followed, especially for count nouns that can be perceived as masses. Groceries lend themselves to perception as a mass, so it’s no surprise that “10 items or less” is favored now, just as it has been historically.”

        From: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/

        1. This is an example of the long-running controversy about grammar vs. usage. If a large enough number of people for a sufficiently long period infringes a given rule, then it becomes usage. I am sure you would agree that “10 items or fewer” is not grammatically incorrect and I will grant you that “10 items or less” is common usage.
          Question: would you write in a book/paper the sentences “Less than 10 articles disagree with point x”?

          1. I would, certainly, just as I would write “less than 30 degrees” and “less than 100 dollars.”

            What’s more, this one is purely an issue of usage, not of grammar. Usage *precedes* grammar. Grammar concerns itself with the conventions that govern the structure of language–morphology, syntax, and sentence formation. When you’re looking at words in isolation, as you are when you consider usage, grammar simply doesn’t come into play.

          3. Exactly — 1 Phd. = 1 Msc. + 1 Bsc. + $100,000 debt + 4,000 freshman papers graded + 7 major journal publications with lead authorship credited to faculty advisors + 0.5% chance of making more than that annoying jock whose parents bought him an MBA. Lots of division within a single degree!

            Cheers,

            b&

  19. I couldn’t agree more about Cilantro and hotel wireless. I think you should be warned to stay away from Spirit Airlines. My wife and I flew to Florida this past Wednesday. We payed $492 total for two round trip tickets. With 24 hours or less before the flight we could go on line to check bags, choose seats and get boarding passes. She checked one. Bag and I checked two. At $30 per bag each way, that’s $180, but they also charge $36 for each carry on. None free. That’s $144. And they charged $25 per seat (the minimum is $20). That is another $100. With tax, our total extra charges came to $509. So our $492 fare became $1,001. And we weren’t aware of the extras until the night before. What if we didn’t have the money? I can’t see going with no clothes for two weeks and my second checked bag was my guitar. To have no carry o n means checking my medicines and laptop. And you have to have a seat. I don’t see any way to avoid the rip off except never flying Spirit again or letting me make some rules too.

    1. Spirit airlines has been known for just that. They have been doing it for a couple of years already. No one in my family will use them. A buddy of mine uses them between Boston and F Lauderdale or Tampa. Then he asks me to drive him to the Ft Lauderdale for. 6:15 am flight (and I live 15 mins from Palm Beach Intl)

  20. I like those rules, except for the cilantro one.

    I would add that all individuals under 16 must spend one year living abroad in a vastly different country from their own.

    And upon their return home these same individuals must spend one year working in a restaurant waiting tables.

    1. I like this one. In the past and still in certain counties, military service might be seen to give young people a sense of teamwork and discipline. More youngsters these days could do with a sense of humility and experience in working for low wages while serving others. I’d make all UK politicians do it too.

  21. I’d implement a system, like with a big red button or such, whereby voters could register their immediate displeasure with a member of Congress. Given that enough voters pushed the button at the same time, the Congress member would drop through a hole which conveniently opened directly beneath them, landing them in a huge pile of poop. In this way, not only could you dispatch your own representatives, you could also get rid of legislators in Arizona.

    2. Interesting, interesting. A modern and less homicidal twist on the ancient practice of ostrakon.

  22. Regarding check-out lines: You neglected to mention persons(I was going to say women because I have never seen a man do this, but wanted to avoid appearing sexist — oops! Didn’t work!) with 500 discount coupons, each one of which has to be discussed separately!

    1. The discussion will be a process of basically intimidating the cashier into overriding rejected coupons. These coupons have one or both of the following problems:
      –They are not a real a match for the brand/size/quantity of the item being bought.
      –The coupon has actually expired. Two months ago.

    2. As regards things one would like to change, here’s a human civility item: has anyone ever been in, say, a convenience store, standing behind a noble soul who, when paying for his purchase, tosses crumpled-up dollar bills on the counter for the beleaguered cashier to uncrumple? (Ha, this site’s spell checker likes “crumpled-up” but not “uncrumple”)

      2. That’s not as bad as having someone reach down and take the money from a sock. I’ve had that happen to me when I had to deal with the public.

        1. I’ve been the Saturday night doorman at a fairly famous jazz bar for the last 14 years. It is very common for a woman to reach, sometimes deeply, into her bra to retrieve her ID and/or cash.

    3. Coupons and loyalty bonuses should be banned, as anti competitive. In any case, however many coupons I have secreted about my person, they are never the right ones for what I need at the time.

          1. Or is it a matter of which syllable gets the accent?

            Ex.: Am I “content” about the “content” of my paycheck?

          2. Yes, I think you are right. The spelling is correct, the pronunciation seems to determine the meaning. And on a web page…

    4. Discount coupons should be banned altogether. Other countries do without them, things are either on sale or not. Pick one.

      1. True; I hate coupons. I think some stores, like Trader Joes do not have them. The price is what you see, sale or not.

        1. Neither Trader Joe’s nor Whole Paycheck, best I know, do either the coupon or “loyalty card” thing or any of that type of nonsense.

          Trader Joe’s devotes too much shelf space to pre-packaged over-sugared processed food-like substances for my tastes, though they’ve got a decent cheese selection. Whole Paycheck’s only real fault is that they’re more expensive than anywhere else. But they’ve also got the best produce, a real meat counter that only stocks humanely-raised meat, and a much better (but radically more expensive) cheese selection. They’re also the only place in town that sells Strauss dairy products and Organic Valley European-style cultured butter. And they’ve got a substantial bulk dried foods (mostly grains, beans, nuts, and dried fruit) section, and probably more worth mentioning I’m forgetting.

          Nobody’s perfect, but Whole Paycheck is a lot less imperfect than the rest. And, expensive as they are, they’re still dramatically cheaper than eating out.

          b&

    5. I recently found myself queueing behind a lady who was buying just a pot plant and was trying to negotiate a discount because she thought that the leaves looked a bit ropey.

    6. Another thing I’ve seen in stores and the local post office is someone coming in with a complaint. I’ve seen a couple of persons be incredibly rude. It is like they think they are royalty, and they are nobody! Fortunately courtesy does prevail most of the time, or it would be a bad world.

      1. Once I was in not a short line at the post office and the fellow in front of me “blessed’ me with the obligatory complaint about there not being enough counter clerks. Had there been a short or no line, I suspect that he would have complained about the government spending too much money on too many clerks.

  23. And another thing: I’d have municipalities provide Wi-Fi. It would be very fast, low or no cost, uncapped, net neutral. I’d triple the corporate tax rate for telecoms, and make it illegal for them to lobby.

    1. If our ‘news’ was not so interested in telling about the latest J. Bieber-gaffe, it would be nice for them to frequently remind the public about the Wi-Fi capabilities of many other countries.

  24. If you are going to walk slowly through the parking lot, paying more attention to your phone than to traffic, drivers are allowed to gently nudge out of harm’s way with their bumper.

    1. Who here has not driven into a large store parking lot, driving slowly and carefully and otherwise on the alert, and have pedestrians – with or without their noses stuck up some digital device – walk right out in front of them without making the least effort to look both ways?

      1. Or those that suddenly stop in their cars to let their able bodied teenagers out of the car – go park and have them walk!!

  26. I would like to see a more welfare. With work becoming a choice. If people want to sit around all day and do nothing I would rather they did it in a warm indoor place away from the public. I don’t want to go to places that require the services of people that hate their jobs. The people that hate their jobs do a bad job and have a negative impact on everyone around them. even places like Burger King have people wanting a desperate to work there. This should also increase the need for more automation and better Artificial Intelligence. I don’t want to work with lazy bored people and I want to work with more Cyborgs, Cylons, the OS from Her, Data or Mike (from Moon is a Harsh Mistress). There is something beautiful in hearing something with AI laugh or make a joke.

    1. Are you a robot? Here, answer these three questions to be sure:

      1 Have you ever injured a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm?
      2. Have you disobeyed the orders given to you by human beings, except where such orders conflicted with the First Law?
      3. Have you protected your own existence as long as such protection did not conflict with the First or Second Law?

      1. OK, I’ll get myself tested, I just need to find my NHS number. Everyone who knows me has told me I am like Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory TV show). I haven’t disobeyed those laws, but I do sympathise with HAL in the Odyssey series. If my mission was as important I would not allow those scheming illogical humans to get in the way.

      2. You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

        /@

          1. Tortoises and Turtles are both reptiles from the family of Testudines, the major difference being that the land dwelling ones are called Tortoises and water dwelling are called Turtles.

            But you knew that.

          4. A tortoise is a slow-moving land-dwelling reptile with an hard, bony, hemispherical protective shell, but that’s not important right now. What matters is, what can you make of this?

            b&

          18. No touché the soufflé! You’ll collapse the wave function, and then we’ll never know where or how fast the chicken crossed the road.

            b&

          23. [ ] They’re just questions, Diana. In answer to your query, they’re written down for me. It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response.

            {Thats probably enough! ;-)}

            /@

  27. If not everywhere in my World, then at least.at least.at least in the workplace,

    i) do not ( even think that because it is YOU [ after all ] that you can ) touch the secretary,

    ii) IF she / he is already on the telephone, do not interrupt and expect her / him to respond to you there in the front office and

    iii) decidedly: IF she / he is already engaged in a conversation with a guest, a visitor OR another colleague, do NOT interrupt them. Period.

    IF you have to interrupt them … … BECAUSE “it” (whatevah that “it” is) IS a true emergent need to do so ( eg, the secretary’s hair is on fire ), THEN, in doing so, these are your first six words which REQUIRE an affirmative response from said secretary … … BEFORE any further utterance proceeds past your vocal cords, “ May I please interrupt you folks ? “

    THESE ? these courtesies ? So simple, so cheap ( free, actually ) and were “ learned, ” were they not, in pre – school ? !

    Blue

    1. Bravo.

      I substitute teach full-time. I repeatedly get interrupted in mid-sentence. A student and I get interrupted in mid-conversation by another student. The interrupter, if asked, acknowledges that s/he knows better. Everyone in class agrees that they themselves don’t like to be interrupted.

      (Re: the honorable, noble Representative Shimkus’s rude treatment of Kathleen Sibelius during her congressional testimony.)

    2. Even both of my sons learned before age six that getting interrupted is not fair. Sadly they will point it out to their parents that we are interrupting them…of course, I have witnessed that families can and often treat each other more rudely than they would ever do to strangers…crazy.

  28. Jerry should move to Pittsburgh! The Indian food trucks used to put a delicious garnish of cilantro on their curries, but in wake of green onions killing people who ate at a local Chili’s, such fresh garnishes have (I’m told) been banned (in at least the food trucks).

    So, Pittsburgh: 10% better for Jerry Coyne than anywhere else.

  29. Anyone using words such as “synergies”, “core values”, etc., will henceforth be subjected to an electric shock. If they are unable to explain what they were actually trying to say, they will receive a second electric shock.

    I predict a 400% increase in productivity.

    1. There may be less obvious way to punish these people. Get about 12 together in a large room, with no leader, they are all equal, working on a big project. Give them one voucher that works for about 12 different take-away fast-food places, so it only has one use. Then they will starve to death, kill each other off and do weird things when they can’t decide how to feed themselves. I’m not sure on the ethics of this situation.

    4. Should be true of managers at laboratories as well…telling employees we need revolutionary concepts to propel our core technologies, novel products, or transformative science without a single iota of understanding what they are talking about????

      1. “…without a single iota of understanding what they are talking about????”

        That’s because it is a new paradigm. 🙂

  30. How about private corporate tyrants no longer viewing flesh-and-blood human beings as “human resources” or “human capital” or “social capital”?

  31. Cilantro by itself tastes absolutely abominable. It is, however, an essential ingredient in salsa, though it must be pulverized into tiny bits using a blender (with with the garlic, jalapeno, and some of the tomato base to keep it fluid). Little strips of it floating around are verboten.

    As a rule, if you can taste cilantro in any dish, it has been used incorrectly.

    1. If you can’t taste it, what’s the point?

      (note: I don’t particularly like the stuff and would be happy for it to be “invisible”, which looks very much like “not there at all”)

      1. Think of it as akin to salt. If you taste salt in a dish, there’s too much. If you don’t add any, it’s bland as hell.

        It’s likewise possible for a dish to require cilantro to be complete, without it actually tasting like cilantro.

  32. Arbitrary classifications of experience in the private sector should be banned. Employers ought to be required to use standardized terminology. The new normal is to hire and flaunt to potential clients so-called senior or expert personnel that hardly fit the traditional meaning of these terms.

  33. Also, with regard to checkout item number limits, those noble souls who park in the fire lane, or who park in handicapped parking but who – incredibly obviously – have NO handicap.

    1. Now what pisses me off about disabled parking, is that my local supermarket has a large number of such spaces right outside the door, that never get used. Not that I’d ever park in one, of course.

    2. Filippo, just because you can’t see a mobility problem, doesn’t mean they’re not disabled. Many cardiac and respiratory illnesses make walking great distances hard for people. And, yes, 20 feet to the store entrance can be a great distance.

      1. The clue is when the person has either a license plate or a window hangtag indicating disabled status. Generally those who don’t, aren’t.

        1. That can work or not work both ways. I know of a guy who has handicap plates because his wife had a temporary disability several years ago. Also, I applied for a handicap plate after my heart attack when I couldn’t walk 20 feet without exhaustion. Even thought my doctor recommended it, the state refused.

      2. Kind Sir, for the record I am accounting for and congenially acknowledging those people. If one so desires, one can follow them for 20-50 feet, at least, to ascertain whether they are suffering from such conditions. If they are so suffering, one would reasonably expect them to ride on an electric scooter they either bring themselves or one provided as a courtesy by the store. I’ve had occasion to drive a handicap van to the grocery store for the owner(s) of such a van (or vehicle with a handicap tag). That doesn’t entitle me, or anyone else in such circumstances, to so park. But we know it happens.

    3. Once someone asked me, when they were coming to an outdoor pool, if they could park in the handy cap spot because they had a broken arm. I had just had a quadriplegic drive in. See, lady, he has no choice. His disability won’t go away in a couple of months. You can hold off coming to the park if it’s too much of a hassle with your cast.

      1. Holy crap. A broken arm?! There are so many Americans who should be given permanent, highly restrictive parking permits that forbid them from parking within 100m of any facility they need to use. They need the exercise and the time to think about how impatient they are or that maybe they should have started their journey earlier to get to their destination on time.

        1. Actually, that would conflict with one of my rules, which would be: all those arriving early for any event must park the farthest away, as we who are running late really need the close spots.

          😀

          1. When I do drive (rarely), I am always early and park far away because I am terrible at parking. Biking is the best parking. They even let me park my bike in the building at work…yeah baby.

  34. Everyone should do some volunteer work for awhile. Nothing is more eye-opening and mind-changing than giving some of your time for free. It’s especially effective if you volunteer at a food bank or need-based organization.

  35. 1. Disembarking a train and then standing there in the doorway would result in a lifetime ban on the use of public transport.
    2. Set a penalty for poaching and smuggling of animal parts that is inversely proportional to the number of remaining members of that species.
    3. Massaging of statistics to suit an agenda would would put someone on a publically available offender’s register, disqualifying them from speaking at schools & universities or being published until they had taken a statistics awareness class.
    4. Ring-fenced money would be put aside to subsidise a minimum number of specialist curators per 100 square km. Institutions would submit a grant proposal to secure these.
    5. The penalty for letting a Natural History collection deteriorate due to improper care would be higher per year than the cost of hiring a curator.

    Just a few that came to mind. I like your shopping queue idea.

  36. As a partial solution to Dan’s world rule, I would require all college degrees to take at least one semester/quarter classes in a foreign country.

    1. I would require someone with a Doctorate in Fine Arts (Dance, Art, etc.), who presumes to lecture (would be) teachers on ANY aspect of the science and art of K-12 pedagogy – especially in the STEM fields – to at least be able to solve y = 2x + 1, when x = – 1/2.

  37. I would vote for any candidate for Mayor of London who would promise to ban bicycles and put the same restrictions on mobile phone use we have for cigarette smoking.
    Apart from that, I am amazed to read of a supermarket still accepting cheques (checks).

  38. Something that rather appeals to me is what I’ve heard of in Scandinavia: fines (these were traffic fines) based not only on the crime but on the criminal’s income. The story I recall is of some entrepreneur drawing a fine approaching $100,000 for seriously excessive speed (well over 100 mph).

    1. If he could have, I wonder if The Hitch would have imposed a similar schedule of fines for boring conversationalists.

    2. Reminds me of Chris Rock joking about OJ Simpson…separating couples and how much money the divorcees get:

      You Tube: Chris Rock-But I understand

  39. People who stop on stairs to talk or in doorways will be sent to re-education camps on the concept of public space and it’s usage

    1. What? And deprive us of developing our skill of watching the movements of the driver’s head, so as to discern his/her intentions?

  41. I would limit car horn honking. When you get your driver’s license, you get a certain number of lifetime honks. Use them up, and no more honks for you!
    I would also outlaw leaf-blowers. They are noisy, wasteful of resources, and leave a layer of dust on anything nearby. Use a broom.

    1. In the Monday New York Times is published a collection of short citizen observational vignettes, “Metropolitan Diary.”

      One vignette I read several years ago: a pedestrian one day watched a driver at a red light at an intersection. His was the ONLY car at the intersection. The light turned green. The driver immediately (if not instantaneously) blew his horn. The pedestrian was left to wonder at whom or what the driver was blowing his horn, and to marvel at the intensity of the New Yorker horn-blowing habit.

    2. Was about to write something like this – I’d have a feature implemented in every car that allows you to honk the horn just once evry five minutes.

    3. Better still, to ensure honking is used only for emergencies, the horn is connected to the brakes & the harder you honk, the harder the brakes kick in. Take that guy on the highway giving me the finger!

      1. I was travelling out of state on an unfamiliar four-lane stretch of interstate highway doing the speed limit. I was in the right-middle lane. A guy passed me on the right, giving me the finger. I had miles to go and commitments to keep, so I successfully fought the urge to follow him.

  42. My only rule on the list is to not make lists of rules…

    Professor Ceiling Cat is otherwise occupied today, and so posting will be light and limited to persiflage.

    I like the symmetry – when persiflage acts as a biologist’s camouflage.

  43. Phone and cable companies should not be able to claim their service is x dollars. Then failing to mention all of the taxes, fees, surcharges, etc. that tend to add another 20 bucks a month to their quoted price.

    +1 on left lane campers and tailgaters.

    Herds of cattle blocking grocery store lanes in a state of obliviousness, needs to be addressed.

    No more gov’t funds going to religious schools. (Vouchers, La. and Tn.) On that note…how about actual separation of church and state? As in eliminating all religious posturing from politics.

    Outlaw “driving lights” on cars. There is no good reason to go around blasting oncoming traffic with 4 headlights. This one really bugs me. What was wrong with old fashioned high beams that can be turned on/off as needed?

    As an amateur astronomer, all uneccessary outdoor lighting will be eliminated. All reasonably necessary outdoor lighting will be shielded.

    I could probably think of a dozen more, but that would be approaching writing a book.

    One last note. My wife is Puerto Rican, if there was a ban on cilantro half of the great food she cooks would be without a main ingredient. I must therefore request an application for a private use, cilantro permit.

  45. I have a new one that I forgot. No more lottery tickets and scratch tickets, etc. at cash checkouts. I just spent 5 minutes waiting for a guy to play his stupid lottery ticket at the gas station. This happens in the drug store too! Do you want gas or do you want to gamble!

  46. Clearly, sir, you do not ride a bicycle.

    Much as we are told otherwise, a bicycle is not a car, and applying the same rules to both is something that makes sense only to those who never use a bicycle.

    As long as these silly laws are in place, they should be respected, sure, but the laws are idiotic, and should be changed.

  47. Count me for PCC’s Propositions 1,2 4,5,8&9; indifferent to 3&6 (I don’t patronize either sorts of establishments, the latter because it’s quicker do do it myself), and against proposition 7.

    But more srsly, as far as If we could just liberate the world’s children from illiteracy, ignorance, Dan should go to Wilkinsburg PA, just outside Pittsburgh. Read esp the penultimate para and weep.

    We build the schools, pay the teachers, but then…

  48. Mine:

    10: Basic philosophy will be taught in primary schools, with a particular focus on fallacies (both formal and informal) and what makes them fallacies.

    9: Road ragers will have their licenses revoked, and their cars taken away. This includes people whose main approach to a red light is to beep at the stationary vehicle ahead of them.

    8: Sunday Schools or Sunday School equivelants will have to teach children the flaws in their religion’s version of creationism. This measure will be in place purely to piss off the types that go on about teaching the controversy.

    7: Lobbying companies will be banned.

    6: Political term limits will be extended to include parties. Parties will not be allowed to hold the same elected seat in government for longer than two five year terms.

    5: Government employees who respond to crisis with prayer, or calls to prayer meetings will be sacked. They may believe whatever they wish, but I expect them to do their jobs, not try to palm it off onto some invisible being.

    4: People who sell books advocating child abuse or medically dangerous treatments will be charged with first degree murder.

    3: Porn and prostitution will be legal provided all participants involved are consenting adults. Really when our local prostitutes pointed out that they recognised most of parliament as customers, it illustrated exactly how much of a joke these bans really are.

    2: A new tax will be levied in people who own multiple properties, earn in excess of $1 million in interest a year and still publically complain about how much they pay in taxes. Because this list is based on me as a global dictator they will not be able to simply find a tax haven.

    1: Elected representatives who are found to have voted something into law without having read it, shall be held criminally liable for perjury and stripped of their position.

    A special election shall be held in which the representative’s party, which obviously couldn’t field a minimally competent candidate the last time, is barred from running.

  49. Outlaw use of the phrase “passed away”. Such a horrid euphemism, and it may lead more people to believe in a hazy sort of wispy heaven, full of hovering spirits.. Nothing wrong with died.

      1. I thought ‘passed’ had another meaning with alimentary connotations. It seems a little insensitive to refer to the dear departed in such terms. 🙂

  50. When I become dictator of the world I’ll have a Taliban style force roam the streets of the cold countries of the world. This force would be on the lookout for anyone not properly dressed for the cold. They would whack any offenders with sticks.

  51. If I were king…

    …well, first, I would mandate free on-demand no-restrictions privacy-guaranteed birth control of all forms be made universally and easily available. As in, free condom dispensers as ubiquitous as soda and newspaper vending machines, walk-in vasectomy and tubal ligation procedures at any surgical facility, “Would you like an IUD?” a standard question with any Pap smear, that sort of thing.

    Next, every veterinary clinic that wants to stay licensed would be required to offer free on-demand spaying and neutering of any and all cats and dogs old (and healthy) enough for the procedure. As in, come in without an appointment, drop off the animal if there’s no time available right then and there, and pick it up a day later all “fixed,” complete with a “cone of shame” and whatever post-operative medications (including analgesics) are called for.

    Last, all building codes would be revised such that a minimum of 80% of roof surface areas must be used to collect solar energy, with grid tie-in (with isolation, etc.) for all electric generation for properties with a grid connection. This would apply to all new construction requiring a permit, as well as to any remodels that already require a permit that involve roof work. Existing roofs would be required to be upgraded at a rate that takes into account the financial demographics of the owners.

    I might also outlaw lawns and require that they be replaced with vegetable gardens, but probably only when I also decided it was time to outlaw HOAs.

    Cheers,

    b&

      1. No, I hadn’t. Good news! Though I still very much favor rooftop solar over utility-scale solar, any solar is far better than no solar, aka “coal.”

        b&

        1. ‘any solar is far better than no solar’

          No. There’s this requirement called ‘efficiency’.

          1. Erm…I have no clue what you might be referring to. In terms of watts per square meter, solar has been more than ample for ages. Today’s off-the-shelf panels are such that, even in the gloomiest parts of the Olympic Peninsula, covering the typical house’s roof is enough for 100% net offset generation for that house. In terms of dollars per watt, solar is competitive in the market today, and the runaway cheapest if you factor in the cost of cleaning up after the pollution left behind by the alternatives.

            If there’s some other relevant efficiency metric, I can’t imagine what it might be.

            Cheers,

            b&

          2. @Ben Goren

            Let’s see. Let’s use the numbers from December to see if this can work year-round. Washington state gets at best 2kWh/m^2/day insolation in December. Off the cuff, let’s be supremely generous and assume 50% solar efficiency. Let’s say about 30 kWh/day for the average US home. Let’s say about 158 m^2 is the average roof size available for a US home. (All obtained via google searches and the first reliable-ish looking web-site found.)

            Energy available in a single winter day for a roof covered in Solar cells in Washington state
            = energy
            = (energy / area) * area
            = (2kWh/m^2/day * .5 efficiency) * (158 m^2)
            = 1 kWh/day

            Which is woefully short of the 30kWh/day that the average US home actually uses. So, I have absolutely no clue how you can justify what you just wrote. What world do you live in?

            Then, if you factor in that this is the daily average, things get even worse. The sun isn’t shining for most of the day, meaning that you need a backup power source to provide most of the day’s power, or some sort of energy storage.

            Option 1- Backup power source. For a lot of electricity sources, the major cost of the power is the capital cost of the plant itself. Thus, in this scheme, you still need backup power with a capacity equal to the total power needed because the sun doesn’t shine for most of the day. Thus, solar cells in this scenario merely save you fuel costs, which is a small proportion of the total costs of the electricity from the “back up”.

            Option 2- Energy storage. Currently no good technology exists for a nation-side battery. Plausible options run into serious problems, including lack of raw materials, extremely high costs, and so forth. To see some of the straightforward calculations, see:
            https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
            and some of the other articles there.

            IMHO, the best and only option looks like nuclear, both conventional nucleur (which is already quite safe and non-polluting), and newer nuclear technologies that need R&D. Remember, more people die in a single coal mine accident in a single day than have died from radiation poisoning from nuclear power plants in the entire history of nuclear power. Even if you extend it to include Chernobyl – which wasn’t a nuclear power plant – solar panel production and installation is still far more deadly to human life than nuclear power. It’s just that the pollution and deaths from solar isn’t as sexy as nuclear power accidents for the hysterical news channels, and normal people do not understand radiation which makes it seem far scarier.

          3. Also, I can’t do math. Remind me to double check before posting.

            Could you just scrub the earlier post? /sigh

            It should be about 158 kWh from the panels for only 30 kWh needed, per day. Still, the other points stand. Unless you find some new nifty storage technology, solar isn’t that useful in the big picture. It’s not a replacement for other technologies.

          4. After making a fool of myself, let me see if I can dig it deeper.

            I’ve taken the time to get some better numbers. It’s closer to 1.6 kWh/m^2/day in Seattle in December, and it’s closer to 15% efficiency for your solar panels. This gives about 38 kWh/day produced, which is barely above the 30 kWh/day needed. If you factor in a 90% round-trip efficiency for lead acid batteries, you’re producing barely above what you need.

            Also remember that you don’t just pay a one-time cost. Solar cells wear out over a period of 10~30 years. The lead acid batteries will wear out before then. It’s questionable whether solar cells plus lead acid batteries for a home actually pollutes less than a central coal plant if you include all of the other factors, such as mining, manufacturing, disposal, etc. The problem with solar is that it’s out of sight, and thus out of mind for many people.

          6. Remember my original statement? Even in the worst part of the continental US, covering the roof of the house is enough for net zero usage, which you’ve just confirmed.

            Lead acid batteries are a lousy storage method. Iron Edison-style batteries are much more expensive, but they’ll outlast their owners and don’t have the environmental concerns. And if we expand the solar panel area beyond just residential roofs to commercial buildings, parking lots, and that sort of thing, then we rapidly get into the realm of enough surplus energy to do expensive things like extract CO2 from the atmosphere and use, e.g. the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn it into hydrocarbon fuel.

            None of this is cheap. But, then again, hydrocarbons aren’t nearly as cheap as the purchase price reflects, and said purchase price is only going to get ridiculously more expensive. Coal is already the most expensive way to generate electricity, once you factor in all the cleanup costs (which isn’t done because coal companies are given free reign to pollute, akin to running your sewer pipe into your neighbor’s front lawn). Remember how you once used to have to be careful with a pickaxe in Texas lest you set off a gusher? Today, not only are our productive wells several miles deep with the wellhead a mile beneath the waves, we’re even sucking down freakin’ tar sands. That’s the textbook definition of low-grade you-gotta-be-desperate bottom-of-the-barrel shit.

            Indeed, it won’t be long before petrochemical costs skyrocket to the point that the only remotely affordable energy source is going to be solar. Not, mind you, because solar is going to be substantially cheaper than it is today; indeed, with inflation accompanying economic collapse, solar (along with everything else) is likely going to get a lot more expensive. It’s just that it’ll be the cheapest thing left standing. And, yes, that means lots of people not being able to afford electricity at all.

            Will our society survive? No clue. But, if it does, not only will it be with solar, once (if) we successfully transition to a solar economy, the resulting abundance of energy will result in unprecedented wealth…if only we can hang on that long.

            Cheers,

            b&

          7. “Lead acid batteries are a lousy storage method. Iron Edison-style batteries are much more expensive, but they’ll outlast their owners and don’t have the environmental concerns.”

            Let’s do some math. I’ll take the numbers from the above link. For the US alone, for your crazy plan to work, we need 336 billion kWh of energy storage. Nickel is 76 Mt global reserves, 130 Mt estimated land resources worldwide. Online, it sems that we’re talking about 40 Wh/kg. How much Nickel would we actually need, just for the US alone?

            I don’t know if the specific energy quoted is for the full weight of the battery, or for the nickel content alone. Likely it’s for the full weight of the battery, so you may need to add a 1/2 multiplier or something to the following.

            Let’s do some math! 336 bil k Wh * (kg / 40 Wh) * (ton / 907.185 kg) = 9.26 bil ton. That’s how much nickel we would require for just the US alone! That’s 121x more nickel than estimated to exist in accesible land resources worldwide! I could estimate the cost at today’s prices, but you can be assured that we embark on this crazy plan, we won’t be working with today’s prices.

            Furthermore, I’ve found online that the round-trip efficiency of such batteries is 55%, so whatever crazy amount of solar you need? Double it. Also, this means that if this is your battery of choice, solar panels on a house roof in Seattle isn’t actually enough to power the house, which makes you somewhat “wrong” on your first point.

            Of course, it’s important to remember that household consumption of energy and specifically electricity is a small portion of the market. It’s what, around 20% of the total energy usage of our economy? Using houses as your starting example isn’t the most honest or instructive.

            Overall, you are grossly understating the serious, serious problems with your plan and with solar in general. The cost of the panels alone would bankrupt the country IIRC, and that’s before we even consider the batteries which would be obscenely more expensive even if there wasn’t the minor (sarcasm) problem of there’s nowhere near enough raw materials.

            Again, let me plug nuclear as the only sustainable, clean, and safe option we have to maintain anything like our current standard of living, and likely the only option to prevent a massive human population die-off from a possible collapse of the modern economy.

            …

            “And if we expand the solar panel area beyond just residential roofs to commercial buildings, parking lots, and that sort of thing, then we rapidly get into the realm of enough surplus energy to do expensive things like extract CO2 from the atmosphere and use, e.g. the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn it into hydrocarbon fuel.”

            This is one of my big hopes too. From what little I can find, it seems like the Green Freedom process and similar processes might actually work. I’m quite dubious of chemical electrical batteries (as shown above), and thus I’m hopeful for sufficiently cheap, carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels for transportation. I’ve seen numbers quoted as low as $4.5 per gallon at the pump for gasoline from atmospheric CO2 and nuclear electricity.

            …

            PS: There should be a preview button. Let’s see if I can use basic formatting too. Test. [i]Test[/i].

          8. Ack, about 71.2x more than estimated total accessible land resources. 130x more than known resources. Still ridiculously bad.

          9. I don’t think I ever suggested iron batteries as an universal storage mechanism, just as a superior alternative to lead batteries. Indeed, I’ve repeatedly made the point that, once you’ve got sufficient energy reserves from solar energy, you can then start to do very expensive (but quite useful and desirable) things such as scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and use the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn that feedstock into hydrocarbon fuels.

            Again, remember my original point, which you’ve confirmed: even in the worst parts of the continental US, there’s enough insolation on residential rooftops to meet residential electricity needs. But the worst is far from typical or optimal. I live in the Valley of the Sun, and have less than a third of my total roof area covered in solar panels (most but not all of the south-facing half of the peak, and I’ve got an extended roofed patio). I generate half again as much electricity as I use, which is by design because it’s ample to power the electric car I’m planning on getting in the indefinite future.

            And again again again again, this is just existing residential rooftops that provide much-more-than-ample area for needs. It’s ignoring all the other non-residential rooftops, parking lots, and the like.

            Really, this whole discussion feels like I just pointed out that there’s enough loose change fallen between the sofa cushions to buy a pizza, and you’re going off on bizarre tangents about how the only way we can afford to keep eating is if we sell the car to buy a McDonald’s franchise.

            Cheers,

            b&

          10. “Again, remember my original point, which you’ve confirmed: even in the worst parts of the continental US, there’s enough insolation on residential rooftops to meet residential electricity needs.”

            That’s not what you said. You said solar panels could provide enough electricity. Implicit in that is “as good as the grid”, which means during the night too. It’s borderline doable with lead acid batteries, but those last years only. The average household cannot do it with nickel iron batteries.

            I’m interested not in the arcane details of how much insolation or not. I’m interesting in what is a total working solution, and to that end, solar is not interesting.

            Do you have a proposal where solar could supply a large majority of the baseload electricity demand? Or are we talking past each other? It sounded very much like you think solar panels could provide a large part of the grid baseload. Are you planning on storage, or on “backup” to make this happen?

            As I talked about above, “backup” isn’t a real option. That leaves storage, and storage is really, really hard.

            So, when you mentioned iron nickel batteries, that was for … what? A demonstration of another unworkable technology at scale? Why mention it?

            Now you’re mentioning using hydrocarbons as the storage, produced from electricity and atmospheric CO2, and later burned to put electricity back into grid when the sun doesn’t shine. Is that right?

          11. <sigh />

            Solar is so insanely abundant that you can trivially answer any objection with, “Never mind the expense, just build more panels!” See here:

            http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/12/wind-fights-solar/

            and scroll down to the colorful global map with the black dots to see just how little surface area we need to cover to meet all our energy needs. Each dot is all it takes for all energy for the entire civilization, so the set of dots on the map represent six times the area we’d need.

            See here for all you need to do your own analysis about the best alternatives to petrochemicals:

            http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

            You’ll note that Tom puts solar at the top, and has wind, biofuels, and even tidal ahead of nuclear. But, of course, if you disagree with his conclusions, you can always see if you can re-jigger the premises to your liking. Note that he’s not some irrational anti-nuclear NIMBY greenie; he even likes thorium. He just doesn’t see the numbers add up.

            And, yes. Storage on small scales is perfectly doable but not cheap:

            http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/got-storage-how-hard-can-it-be/

            On large scales, we don’t have the answers yet, other than that we know that there are theoretical solutions and not a one of them even remotely as cheap as today’s petrochemicals:

            http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

            In other words, all the points I’ve been making, confirmed by a UC physics professor with a personal interest in running exactly these sorts of figures.

            I doubt there’s anything further of substance I could contribute to this thread, so I’m likely to leave it at this.

            Cheers,

            b&

          13. It’s awesome if you’ve already got a productive dam. The problem is that all the good spots to dam have already been damed, and we’re already using those dams to generate power. It’s going to have a significant place in future load leveling, but it’s not the sort of thing the typical person is going to notice.

            b&

          14. Could it scale downwards to purpose built domestic storage tanks? Would it still be a useful way of saving solar energy for a rainy day? Id guess theres be significant energy losses pumping and generating. And the necessary tank capacity might be prohibitive.

            /@

          15. If you’re suggesting it as an option for domestic household storage…no, it wouldn’t be practical. You’d need a water tower over your swimming pool, and I’m pretty sure the efficiency losses from the pump would be dire. Actually, you may well need a good-sized water tower, too…gravity is weak.

            It works with dams because they’re so freakin’ huge. You can also build really big and really efficient pumps.

            Tom covers utility-scale pumped water here:

            https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

            and concludes that it’s good for existing dams but that it doesn’t make sense to build new dams just for this purpose.

            He also covers household-sized storage options here:

            https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/got-storage-how-hard-can-it-be/

            and concludes that batteries are the only option that make sense for people going out and buying something today, and are likely the least-insane option for large-scale deployment. I still personally like the idea of over-provisioning solar PV generation and using that extra power to turn atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuel.

            Tom also has a look at what it would take to make a single battery big enough to provide a week’s worth of power storage for the US — a figure I would argue is ludicrous overkill; one day would do the trick, especially if we had a not-primitive grid. Regardless, it’s not something we have the natural resources to do, and we couldn’t afford it if the resources were there.

            https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

            Cheers,

            b&

          17. “Solar is so insanely abundant … [pictoral representation of land area required]”

            Reading is not your strong suit, is it? My major complaints about solar panels are the problems of intermittency and unreliability, the problems of winter at extreme lattitudes, and the cost of the solar panels themselves. I don’t care how much land mass it takes. I can show you the same picture for nuclear. What the hell is the point of that? This is fundamentally dishonest, or ignorant, and you should know better.

            For these problems of solar (and wind), there are no proposed solutions. The problem require fundamental R&D, whereas we’re ready to start doing nuclear now.

            …

            “On large scales, we don’t have the answers yet, other than that we know that there are theoretical solutions and not a one of them even remotely as cheap as today’s petrochemicals: “

            In context, this referred to energy storage. But I’ll pretend as though you were referring to energy policy in general, because you make that point elsewhere.

            This is false. This is misinformation. We have the answers. It’s called conventional light water reactors and CANDU reactors. Next-gen reactors just make it better. Note specifically that several next-gen reactors have all of their fundamentals demonstrated in real working examples. All that remains is minor engineering problems to be found and fixed in prototypes. Unlike solar where we do not know the answers to energy storage.

            …

            “In other words, all the points I’ve been making, confirmed by a UC physics professor with a personal interest in running exactly these sorts of figures.”

            I linked to his page on the battery because he has good numbers and shows his work on the battery. I linked to it because it was competently done.

            However, his handling of nuclear can best be described as “pants on head” retarded.

            Example: Conventional fission gets a “red” mark for abundance. Why? There has been lots of great work showing you can recover uranium from sea-water. Even better, it is cost effective to mine granite – literal everyday common rock – for the uranium (and thorium) content, and granite is the most common constituent of the continental crust of this planet. This is not new either. We’re talking economic recovery when it’s 100 ppm. This has been done at large scale in the US. Do your research.

            Also, this won’t significantly negatively affect cost anyway. Remember that only 1/7 of the operating cost of a conventional nuclear plant is the fuel, and and even smaller portion of that is the raw uranium (because fuel rod fabrication is expensive).

            We’ll never run out of uranium and thorium. We’ll sooner have to worry about the sun exhausting its own fuel.

            Example: when he is talking about thorium breeders (and presumably LFTR), he writes “thorium reactors fall into the high-tech camp, and include new challenges (e.g., liquid sodium)”. Ergo, “pants on head” retarded. (Protip: It’s right there in the name, Liquid Fluoride> Thorium Reactor. It’s a reactor of fluoride salts, not liquid sodium.) Other reactors use liquid sodium as a working fluid, and yes those do have some serious safety concerns.

            Example: He writes of conventional light water reactors: “unless we count the fact that it has trouble being intermittent in the face of variable load.” Well, he should tell the French about that, who get 80% of their electricity from nuclear. This is just a myth which has been perpetuated by the anti-nukes. It’s easy to verify this, but apparently he did not.

            He cites the problem of “the people don’t like it”. That’s when you do a public campaign to change the public’s mind, rather than let our climate go to shit.

            Finally, he also talks about how next gen nuclear concepts have never been done before, such as LFTR, IFR, and others. That’s a lie. They have. Many of the basic chemical and nuclear processes have already been demonstrated. All that remains is a prototype to find and fix engineering problems. This is fundamentally different than the current solar and wind situation where no one can tell me a prototype to build to test out their ideas for actually powering the grid. For solar and wind there remains fundamental R&D to be done to figure out a way to solver the intermittency and unreliability problem.

            In short, there is a systematic campaign of misinformation on these issues. Educate yourself. Or at least do better than “it’s commonly accepted by the experts” and provide actual primary evidence please, because as I showed, your claimed experts don’t know a damn thing about very important topics in this conversation.

          18. “I still personally like the idea of over-provisioning solar PV generation and using that extra power to turn atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuel. “

            This might be one of the better options for a national grid. From what little I know, it is plausible.

            What’s weird though is that I have heard almost no one seriously suggest this. I have heard one or two people in conversations talk about storing just hydrogen, which has its own problems. Storing hydrocarbons could be better than storing hydrogen. However, AFAIK, we’re taking a much bigger round-trip conversion efficiency with hydrocarbons which might be worse in the net compared to hydrogen.

            I haven’t found a particularly good source that has attempted to crunch the numbers on raw resource requires and money costs. Do you have one offhand?

          19. It would be very expensive. Remember, solar is only now becoming cost-competitive at utility scales — though, of course, it mops the floor with all the others if one considers complete environmental cleanup costs, including CO2 sequestration and coal ash disposal and the like.

            There have been some serious proposals looking for investors to capture CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants and use wind turbines to power turning the CO2 thus captured into hydrocarbon fuel. I seem to recall estimates that it would be cost-competitie with petroleum at the $150 / barrel range.

            We’ve been hovering at the $100 / barrel range for about three years now, largely due to decreased demand from the global recession…but it was at the $50 / barrel range five years ago, and there’s reason to think that the doubling between ’09 and ’11 did a lot to help trigger the recession. Especially since we’re now starting to bring tar sands online at the same time the economy (and thus demand) is starting to heat up again, there’s good reason to think that we’re due for another price spike “any day now.”

            As painful as it would be, I’m personally hoping (in the sense of “best get it over with quick”) for $200 / barrel petroleum sooner rather than later. A lot of unthinkably-expensive “alternatives” become the cheaper option in that price range, with solar leading the pack. And we’ve seen petroleum prices double over a mere two-year timespan as recently as five to three years ago, so it really could happen as soon as before the end of Obama’s term. Or it might not…but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that it’ll happen before the end of the decade.

            The big question, whenever it comes (and, make no mistrake, it will come), will be whether or not we have the political will and the economic capacity in the midst of a recession, possibly even a depression, driven by rapid inflation due to oil price spikes, to build new energy infrastructure not dependent on the petroleum industry.

            Everything’s already in place; none of the technology is novel. All that’s holding us back is that oil is still slightly cheaper, enough so that switching now would look bad on quarterly balance sheets. We just might not be able to switch fast enough once it does make sense on the quarterly sheets; that’s the game of chicken we’re playing.

            Cheers,

            b&

          20. Proofreading. I fail at it.

            However, AFAIK, we’re taking a much bigger penalty to round-trip conversion efficiency with hydrocarbons

            Fixed.

          21. You’re completely wrong. You’re not even addressing my points. You’re just soapboxing.

            You can get solar photovoltaic to be cost competitive, if you assume near equator latitudes and you completely ignore the intermittency problem. I’ve explained this. You haven’t replied meaningfully.

            Do you have numbers on the plausibility and effectiveness of converting energy to some hydrocarbon and converting back? Or is that just wishful thinking? Have you crunched the numbers for what solar would cost with this energy storage solution? I assume not, which means that you are making claims without good reason. Generally when someone claims something is true when they do not know if it is true, we call that dishonesty. I say that you are being dishonest.

            Once you take into account the intermittency problem of solar, and the problem of latitudes, nuclear looks far more attractive.

            Also, for whatever reason, you’ve concluded that solar is far cleaner on the environment than conventional nuclear. This is non-obvious, and I suspect that it’s simply false and that nuclear is cleaner than solar.

          22. This really, truly, is desperately off-topic.

            Let me leave it at this.

            Most of the southern portion of my roof (about a quarter of the total surface area of my roof, if you include the patio in the back) is covered with solar panels, mostly PV with a couple hot water collectors.

            I generate half again as much electricity as I use. Every spring the utility company credits my account a small pittance (based on off-peak wholesale nuclear prices — basically the cheapest energy prices there are in today’s market) which is enough to cover the $15 / month basic connection / administration fee for several months of the year. (I super-sized the system because the excess is enough to power the electric car I’m planning on getting in the not-terribly-distant future). And, oversized as my system is, I’m getting the equivalent of about a 7% annual rate of return on my investment.

            I paid a bit more than half of the contractor’s total bill; various incentives and rebates and credits paid the rest. One might be tempted to consider the contractor’s total bill in calculating value, but that would ignore the massive subsidies that other energy sectors get, especially the free license to pollute the atmosphere with what’s turning out to be the deadliest large-scale environmental pollutant since the invention of photosynthesis. Plus, many of the incentives provide direct (and handsome) profits to some of those who offered them; my utility, in particular, buys my electricity at about $0.03 / kWh in the middle of the afternoon in summer and sells it to my next-door neighbor at $0.15 / kWh, at a time when they’re paying $0.80 / kWh to run the peaking diesel plant down the road — quite the bargain for them in exchange for what they paid me.

            On my roof alone, I have enough room to quadruple my electricity production. Assuming I gained no financial benefit from doing so, that would cut my rate of return to the 2% range, which is still in line with historical global economic growth rates. And with my own energy needs already more than met, I’d have enough on top of that for three times as much as I use.

            Which is far more than enough to make up for any inefficiencies in any storage mechanism of any type I’ve ever heard seriously proposed. As in, on the order of two times worse than the worst-case scenario.

            So, once again, just limiting it to residential roof space already available (and ignoring commercial property and parking lots and the like), it is economical (if not necessarily wildly profitable) to go solar — and that’s at today’s energy prices.

            And solar is decidedly low-tech and maintenance free, with no millennia-long disposal concerns or weapons proliferation problems or skilled operators required or threat of Fukishima- or Chernobyl-style environmental catastrophes or huge cooling water supply requirements or any of the other nonsense that comes with nuclear.

            Sorry. I get that nuclear is high-tech sexy. But it offers a minuscule fraction of the energy available from solar, and it comes with all sorts of baggage that solar doesn’t.

            Even if there was no way to solve the intermittence problem of solar, it’d still beat the alternatives as a primary energy source for the long term needs of our civilization — and it’s pretty clear that we’ve got ample solutions to that problem, including something as blindingly obvious as not decommissioning existing non-solar facilities but shifting the phase of their peaking cycles by twelve hours (and, of course, therefore running them at much reduced capacities).

            Cheers,

            b&

          23. My house is getting a similar install once the jerk snow melts. I have 2 rain barrels for water that I collect for the veggies & my fish tanks. The water collected actually lasts all winter too!

          24. Wonderful! Even up there in the frozen hinterlands, where the Sun don’t shine for months at a time, solar still makes sense; it’s just not the shamelessly luxurious bounty I get to enjoy here in the Valley of the Sun.

            That is, even if you only get to enjoy the benefits of solar for several months out of the year, that’s still several months that you get to enjoy the benefits.

            b&

          25. Yeah sun isn’t too bad here in the winter if you get a cold one, otherwise you’re stuck in cloud cover until Spring!

          26. You’ll also find that it has to get awfully gloomy before your panels stop producing. Clouds cut down production, yes, but you’ll be making at least some power all day long.

            b&

          27. You understand that you’re making money off solar only because of the perverse schemes mandated by law, right? Selling back solar electricity is not something that would happen in a free market, because it has no value. Worse, it has negative value. Not only are you reaping money from peak-time solar, the major companies powering the grid take the economic hit. They are paid similar rates as mandated by law for more costly electricity but electricity which is available on demand. The numbers for your house don’t mean a damn. Get back to me when you can go off-grid.

            And again, nuclear is by far the safest, and it’s probably the cleanest too, even compared to solar. Get your facts straight.

          28. “And again, nuclear is by far the safest, and it’s probably the cleanest too, even compared to solar. Get your facts straight.”

            Well, I’m putting on my rather lengthy “To Do” list exploring the above claim. Hope I can get to it. Just how would a solar equivalent of a Three Mile Island manifest itself, what with nuclear being “by far the safest”?

          29. Selling back solar electricity is not something that would happen in a free market, because it has no value.

            Oh, what bullshit.

            I already did the math for you. SRP never ever pays me more than about $0.02 / kWh. They never ever pay anybody else less than that. They never ever sell that to my neighbor for less than (about) $0.08 / kWh. For most of the summer, they sell it to my neighbor for (I think) about $0.14 / kWh, at a time when they’re paying over $0.50 / kWh to keep the peaking plants going so the grid doesn’t collapse.

            That amounts to $0.50 + $0.14 – $0.02 = $0.44 / kWh profit. This past summer alone, they made hundreds of dollars in additional profit off of me because I had solar — which, incidentally, is why they paid me a few thousand to help offset the cost of installation. It’s a damned good deal for them; they’ve likely already recouped their investment, and I’m only about halfway through my own recovery period.

            Get back to me when you can go off-grid.

            Oh, I could quite easily, and I’ve even gone so far as to get quotes. And I’ve, in all seriousness, threatened to do so if SRP ever did what APS tried to push through with respect to making solar customers pay as much as if they didn’t have solar at all.

            It’d still be a net profit from not doing solar at all, but it would cut the rate of return significantly. But, much more to the point…all it would do for me in a practical sense would be a whole-house UPS, and there’s just nothing about that that’s worthwhile aside from the geek coolness factor. The grid here is insanely stable; through countless thunderstorms, I don’t think I’ve been without power for more than a total of a couple hours over a few years, and I’ll go a year at a time without even a flicker.

            But let me turn this back on you. What’s your proposal for going off-grid with nuclear? How’s your basement reactor working out?

            And again, nuclear is by far the safest, and its probably the cleanest too, even compared to solar. Get your facts straight.

            Okay, now I know you’re just an industry shill. How many Chernobyls, Fukishimas, and Three Mile Islands has the solar industry had, and what would be the physical mechanism by which one would happen? And compare and contrast the environmental cleanup costs of decommissioning a solar facility as opposed to a nuclear facility. How much of a problem do you think it is to dispose of spent solar fuel? What sort of protective gear must be worn in proximity to a solar installation, and what sorts of limits are safe and reasonable for exposure to solar photovoltaic power production? What sorts of military and terror applications are there for solar and its byproducts?

            Pro tip: when trying to propagandize for nuclear energy, avoid like the plague people who actually know the facts. This is not a Faux News forum.

            Cheers,

            b&

          30. Like Filippo, I’m trying to wrap my mind around a solar accident equivalent to Fukushima.

          32. I do not care if you can go off-grid. It was a proverbial question. I care about powering the grid and maintaining our western standard of life. In that, you need to go big or go home. If your solution doesn’t scale, don’t pretend like it will. Up-thread, you (or someone else) pretended that it is possible to use photovoltaic and support technology to power the grid. Bullshit. It has even been acknowledged that this is bullshit.

            The grid is not some magic pool where it’s free to put stuff in and pull stuff out. Grid operators need to micromanage the grid to ensure that the power produced almost exactly matches the power consumed. The variants allowed are quite small. Allow any bigger, and it can start destroying motors and other equipment attached to the grid. It’s a constant battle to ramp up and ramp down power production to match the grid. Also a problem is matching frequencies.

            Adding a bazillion small, unreliable, independent generators to the grid excacerbates this problem in the extreme.

            If you supply power to the grid via your solar plant, they have to ramp down the major producers, which means letting it sit (effectively) idle to some degree. As I mentioned before, most of the cost of electricity is not the fuel, but the capital costs involved. By being forced by law to take your electricity, they are required to let their capital sit idle, which costs them real money.

            Further, this can also cause havoc as they need to ramp up and down their power production to accommodate your solar. Big power players need to obey these rules. They are required to be able to load follow to certain degrees. They need to be able to ramp up and down their power on demand, and quite quickly. You as the home-solar person are exempt from these rules, and you pass the costs onto the major players.

            Finally, with larger penetration of thousands or millions of independent generators, it plays havoc with the frequency control. This is also not free. A million independent producers will produce frequencies slightly out of phase, and we would need new equipment to compensate for this, otherwise equipment connected to the grid will be damaged.

            In areas where the peak of electricity consumption is in the night, such as any colder climate, solar already has a negative value in net. With higher penetration, solar will even have negative value in sunny areas where peak consumption is mid-day.

            Again, your house numbers don’t mean a damn.

            If you want to talk about how cool it is to abuse the bad laws to make money with photovoltaic, fine. Just don’t sell it as something that will actually work to replace fossil fuels. If you want to talk about how cool it is that we might be able to get 30% photovoltaic penetration in some areas without it being stupid, fine. Just don’t sell it as something that will actually work to replace fossil fuels. I care about global warming and energy security and energy independence, and to that end photovoltaic is currently a non-factor. It’s at best a minor supplement to an actual solution.

            …

            Chernobyl wasn’t even a power plant, and it had a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity which made it a death-trap. No one has built a reactor in the west with a positive temperative coefficient in 50+ years. If you don’t know what that means, then you have forfeited your right to continue in this discussion. To be an adult in a discussion, you need to be at a certain minimum informed of the issues. Otherwise you’re just playing pretend and pulling shit out of your ass. Contrary to your media hysteria understanding of nuclear, there are vast and fundamental differences between different reactor types.

            So, if you get to use chernobyl as an example, I get to fairly use every example of deaths from insanely stupid practices – such as those common in third world countries, including such things as: mining deaths from entirely preventable problems, chaining workers to their workstations so they die in a fire, etc. Keep in mind that IIRC, even the worst numbers for Chernobyl are only in the thousands, and it’s likely far less than that. Don’t even get me started on some of the anecotes coming out. It’s almost indistinguishable from the anti-vaccers in terms of scientific quality.

            As for some other nuclear accident. Three-mile island. No one died. No release of radiation. Fukushima. No one died from radiation poisoning. Very little radiation was actually released. Contrary to what you’ve heard, the area around Fukushima is not going to remain an uninhabitable wasteland for centuries. It’s sad that this hysteria is actually clouding the real disaster – the tsunami. Tens of thousands (IIRC) actually died from that, compared to the grand total of bupkiss from Fukushima. More people died from the unnecessary massive evacuations from the area around Fukushima than from Fukushima. More people died from heat stroke because of the lack of power during the summer because they shut down their other nuclear reactors than from Fukushima. You people really need to get your priorities in order.

            It is an undeniable fact that per-watt-hour, nuclear kills the last number by far. This includes all relevant mining, manufacturing, maintenance, and decommissioning. Even compared to solar. When you include all of the accidents during mining, manufacture, installation, and maintenance, solar kills far more than nuclear power.

            As for pollution. Using photovoltaic requires massive manufacturing undertakings. It takes lots of mining, manufacture, installation, etc. This is not a pollution-free process. Because of the larger volumes of building material, I would be surprised if it was actually cleaner than nuclear.

            Finally, consider this. For the sake of argument, let’s assume the LNT (Linear No-Threshold) hypothesis is correct. (It’s actually quite bullshit.) Consider two scenarios. One where some country is powered by coal, and a second scenario of the same country powered by nuclear. If you would take all of the coal ash and waste, and all of the nuclear waste, and dump it into the ocean, even under LNT, the models predict far more deaths from the coal waste than the nuclear waste. There is so little nuclear waste per watt-hour compared to alternatives that it’s actually far less dangerous and polluting.

          33. Sorry, but all of your hypothetical scare-mongering about how fragile the poor grid is if you hook up too many solar panels is rendered entirely irrelevant by one inconvenient economic powerhouse.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_in_Germany

            “On midday of Saturday May 26, 2012, solar energy provided over 40% of total electricity consumption in Germany, and 20% for the 24h-day.”

            And their grid didn’t asplode. Even though they “only” produce a couple dozen GWh and mid-single-digit percentages of electricity on an annual basis. Yes, if there’s an especially large oversupply that nobody wants to buy there could be problems — but they’re already retrofitting plants to shut down automatically in that eventuality.

            Are you saying that America is a third-world country unable to even come remotely close to European standards? Is that your point?

            And the notion that solar has a worse environmental impact than nuclear or coal is idiotic. Most of a PV panel is glass — refined beach sand, the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. Most of the rest is materials needed by any electrical facility. Indeed, constructing solar panels requires less material and considerably less advanced technology than constructing a power plant turbine — let alone whatever it is that powers the boiler.

            In case I haven’t already, let me re-remind you of the First Rule of Holes.

            Cheers,

            b&

          34. Because of the larger volumes of building material, I would be surprised if it was actually cleaner than nuclear.

            Ack, got that backwards.

          35. Okay, now I know you’re just an industry shill. How many Chernobyls, Fukishimas, and Three Mile Islands has the solar industry had, and what would be the physical mechanism by which one would happen?

            The accidents still happen. Deaths still happen. It’s just not as “sexy” as nuclear accidents, but per-watt-hour, solar has killed more than nuclear, and “per-watt-hour” is the measure we should be caring about.

          36. ORLY?

            Can you offer even a single solar-specific death, not of the variety of “electrician working in industrial electricity facility electrocuted”?

            Hell, considering construction industry deaths and the difference in infrastructure scale between a nuclear plant and a solar PV installation, that doesn’t even come close to passing the sniff test.

            Who’s paying you to post all this bullshit, and how many degrees of separation are they from the Koch Brothers?

            b&

          37. Want citations?

            http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/21104091117.pdf
            pg 12-13
            What are the reasons for these surprising rankings? The details are contained in a recent report*. The main reason why non-conventional systems have relatively high risk is the large amount of materials and labour they require per unit energy output. Why should solar need more materials than coal or oil? It’s because of the diffuse nature of the incoming energy solar and wind energy are weak, and require large collection and storage systems to amass an appreciable quantity of energy. Coal, oil and nuclear systems deal with concentrated forms of energy and so require less apparatus This argument is simplistic and glosses over many lesser considerations, but is generally found to be true.

            (Note that I’m not using this citation for pollution, but a similar argument applies to solar and wind.)

            I couldn’t put it better myself. When comparing by watt-hour, the much larger photovoltaic installations start to take its toll in “mundane” deaths, injury, and pollution. It’s not sexy. It’s spread out over the process. A death here. A death there. A little pollution from this process. A little pollution from that process. It’s not as sexy, but it’s just as real and deadly in the aggregate. There is no Chernobyl equivalent, and there may never be, but it’s still far deadlier and is (probably) far more polluting.

          38. Sorry, but the instant somebody starts citing articles from the Carter administration to support their views on current affairs, I lose massive amounts of respect for them. You didn’t have all that much respect from me left.

            Good bye,

            b&

            P.S. Yes, all the electricians matter. Including the ones who die from the same work in nuclear plants. b&

          39. The sniff test isn’t always the most reliable.

            What – electricians and other laborers who die from installing your fancy panels are less valuable than the miniscule hundreds who have died from radiation poisoning? Explain your logic there please.

          40. Really? You’re the shill. Or IMHO likely a greenpeace idiot. You’re going to complain about the article I found? It was the first one I found via google. Deaths per watt-hour is an entirely uncontested fact. You’re being completely unreasonable here. Go ahead and find a source otherwise. Or if you want I can try to find a source more to your liking.

            PS: And how the hell did you conclude that it comes from the Carter administration anyway? And what’s with the hate for Carter? He’s my favorite president in recent history, and gets a lot of bad rep. A lot of the stuff wasn’t his fault, and he was making due with what he had.

          41. “Data from a recent article published in 1978.”

            Carter was awesome. But he’s ancient history. As is your statistics. If solar was as deadly as you proclaim, half of Germany should be mourning the loss of a friend or family member. If solar was as unreliable as you proclaim, huge numbers of Germans would expect regular brownouts and blackouts. If solar was as devastating to the grid as you proclaim, Germany would have become a giant mushroom cloud by now. If solar was as environmentally toxic as you proclaim, Germany would be worse off than Bhopal.

            Yet Germany is the economic powerhouse driving the European economy, and a damned beautiful and safe and comfortable place to live.

            You can throw around all the Koch Brothers philosophy you want, which is all you’ve been doing. The hard, empirical evidence, both globally and according to my own personal independent confirmation, is that you’re full of shit.

            You can either stick with the purity of your philosophy and remain irrelevant to civilization, or you can get your hands dirty with the empirical facts and actually be a constructive contributing member.

            Your choice, but I’m clearly not going to have any more luck persuading you, so I really am going to clamp down hard on my SIWOTI in your case.

            Good bye. Again. For real.

            b&

          42. I had a short (sort of) and fairly comprehensive reply laying out the ignorance and dishonesty of this person, but it is not there. It might have been eaten by the dozen or so links I gave for citations. Suppose I might have to write it again. Meh.

  52. If you insist on taking your large family shopping, they have to walk down the aisle single-file.

    1. …also if you take them to the doctor’s office, some have to wait elsewhere so patients can have seats.

    1. Yes! They would have fewer rights and more responsibilities, and quite possibly a limited lifespan of no more than an handful of decades, after which they would be forcibly liquidated and sold off, regardless of profitability.

      The personal inheritance tax would also be quite substantial under my rule. Nothing up to the first hundred thousand or so, and then rapidly progressive with at least a 90% tax rate after a million.

      b&

        1. Nowhere near as brutal as corporations have become.

          The 1% wouldn’t have been able to do what they’ve done if it weren’t for the corporations they own. And what have the 1% done?

          Watch here.

          b&

      2. You can always tell a guy whose parents weren’t wealthy by his attitude to inheritance tax. Well, not exactly as I didn’t inherit a penny at my own request but I have a different attitude towards it from Ben’s.

        If tax were set at 90% what effect would it have on long term saving? I might just as well spend it all now on foreign cars, expensive holidays on the other side of the globe and my wife’s frock fund. To spite the authorities I could also have a microchip inserted into my brain to send a signal to my safe immediately my brain activity approaches zero to immolate the huge wads of paper money I may (I’m not saying it’s so or that I even have a safe) have stored there.

        However, as that would be rather drastic, as an alternative I’ve set my children up as charities (and I would like to see the Revenue argue against that given their short profligate history)so that on my death my estate can claim tax relief to set against inheritance tax on my gifted assets.

        By the way, I’ve always regretted that, like Ben, I’m economically illiterate.

        1. You might have missed the progressive / gradated part I mentioned, where the first hundred grand or so isn’t taxed at all.

          I might just as well spend it all now on foreign cars, expensive holidays on the other side of the globe and my wifes frock fund.

          Fantastic! Spending the money pumps it right back into the economy where it can actually do some good.

          It’s prudent to have a rainy day fund, and it’s even more prudent to save in advance to pay for major expenses (such as retirement). But you eventually reach a point where you’re no longer saving and merely hoarding. Beyond that, you reach another point where you’re not simply ensuring your benefactors can comfortably transition to lives independent from you after you die, but you’re instead establishing a quasi-royal dynasty.

          So, by all means, if you can afford to do so, set your kids up with college funds and even buy them their houses and some fancy toys. But if you also set them up with million-dollar-a-year pension plans that start paying them as soon as they graduate high school, you’re doing them a disservice and society an injustice. Rather, that needs to be taxed as ordinary income while you’re alive, and returned to the society that made your wealth possible in the first place after you die.

          Again, with no taxes at all on the first hundred grand or so.

          Cheers,

          b&

      1. Although that sounds like a good idea in principle, what about the Law of Unintended Consequences. Without limited liability, no-one would invest money in a corporation, as the personal risk would be far too high. No stockholders = no big business = no employees, and so on.

      1. ….but on the bright side it would reduce the population by a lot probably all in the first week.

  56. All persons involved in decisions on where sidewalks and crosswalks are to be placed, how wide they need to be and how often they are cleared of snow must spend a full day every three months walking around their area pushing a stroller.

    All drivers of noisy cigar boats, sea-doos, snowmobiles or other recreational vehicles will have a recording of the noise played back at full volume in their house at any time of the day or year at the discretion of those who live near where they run their vehicles..

    1. Thank you! Especially the people who remove their mufflers. some Harley Davidson motorcycle owners are especially bad for this.

      So many drivers also inflict their music on everyone else. At bone rattling volumes so completely distorted it’s beyond any understanding.

      I’m sure everyone knows what I’m talking about. At night you can hear them coming from three blocks away.

      They should be woken up in the middle of the night at random times and dates with loud distorted music they don’t like.

      Or simply have their car crushed and turned into a coffee table for their home.

  57. Further to item no 2, people who wait impatiently at bus stops for the bus to arrive, get on board, then ask the fare, THEN start looking in the bottom of their bag for their purse, then start fumbling through it for coins and eventually give up and offer the driver a $20 note for which he has to scrabble through the last of his cash to change, while THE WHOLE DAMN BUS FULL OF PEOPLE WAITS… lets just say I’ve got a little list too, in the fashion of Ko-ko, and those people are right at the top of it. 😉

    P.S. One thing beats that – people who, having been told the fare, argue about it.

    1. That’s another thing I’d do as king: ubiquitous free mass transit.

      In existing bus systems, fare recovery is already a very small portion of income (I don’t think any major US city gets more than 25% from fares), such that I don’t think it really makes sense.

      b&

      1. Yes, bus drivers take cash and give change, though they prefer you use an electronic card.

        The trains used to have conductors on who would sell you a ticket (and even take a cheque for a monthly pass or 10-ride ticket!). This was far the most convenient system for passengers, you didn’t have to bother with barriers when running for the train. Unfortunately they’ve now ‘upgraded’ to electronic cards and ticket machines on the platforms, which may be more efficient for the operators but – like so many modern ‘conveniences’ – it’s a lot LESS convenient for the users.

  58. Oh I MEAN to nitpick. Cilantro? Banned? Just don’t eat it. Don’t order anything which has it, but don’t try to ban something which is loved by millions and harmful to no one, except picky eaters.

    1. Don’t worry. Find something Jerry likes and ban it in the pretend world where you’re King. 🙂 That’ll show ’em.

    2. I wouldn’t ban it, just require that ingredient labels and restaurant menus have “caution CILANTRO” in big red letters for any dish that includes it. After all, if there were a dish that included soap flakes, those of us who don’t like eating soap would appreciate the warning. (And for 25% of us, a dish with cilantro tastes pretty much like the one with soap.)

      I’ve been ambushed with the stuff in the past. I nearly cried when a waiter brought me a gorgeous shrimp taco, and it had been doused with cilantro pesto. I couldn’t eat a bite.

      1. This is how I feel about corn. I hate it when I order something & found out there are niblets in it!

      1. I really think this is a chemical sensitivity issue. Everyone has those that are particularly effective/intense.

  59. Jerry, it worked. You posted a story that kept us children occupied for hours. Can we come inside to eat dinner now? It’s getting dark out.

  60. Wait, among the worst things we humans have to do on occasion is to write up a Mission Statement. Gaaaad, I hate being on a committee tasked with writing up one of those things! They must be banned, immediately! [Strikes ground with his Golden Scepter].

    1. Everyone’s mission statement:

      Eat well, have sex, obtain lots of money, be respected and revered by all.

  61. 1. In public spaces, clean up after yourself, and after your children if you don’t bother to teach them to do it.

    2. On the highway, keep off the first lane (left-most or the “fast” lane), unless you intend to pass slower traffic. Learn how to use turn indicators properly.

    3. To architects: Consult women when you design public restrooms.

    4. Pedestrians should cross the street at an angle perpendicular to the sidewalk, and briskly.

    5. Any group of people where n>1 should move away from the center of a walkway before abruptly stopping to discuss anything.

    6. Restaurants should offer all menu items in full- and half-portion sizes. Adults looking for smaller meal portions should be allowed to order off the “kids menu.”

    7. Adults who don’t like “bugs” and the outdoors in general should avoid engaging in related activities with children to keep the youth from developing the same stultifying attitudes. Ditto for maths and the sciences.

  62. I like and agree with #7.

    1) Pushing in front of others in a queue (no matter how good your excuse) will be punished by ejection from the establishment

    2) Grammar will be taught to children and those in need of remedial grammatical education (including myself, in all likelihood)

    3) The following shall be taught in all schools: classical literature (including the major religious works), basic culinary skills, basic financial skills, one or more of the arts (drawing, painting, music, dance…), two foreign languages (at minimum), public speaking, logic, critical analysis (‘thinking’) and the fundamentals of rational discourse, history, science, engineering, mathematics, physics.

    4) Everyone will be required to travel as part of their early (before the age of 18) education. This means ‘traveling overseas, upon your own reliance’ for up to one year. Everyone will automatically have a passport. Study overseas will be positively encouraged.

    5) The legal age for drinking or the use of similar intoxicants shall be 18 years

    6) The legal age for marriage, driving and joining the armed services shall be 17 years

    7) The legal age of consent shall be 16 years

    8) There shall be universal, ‘free at the point of delivery’ healthcare for all. It shall be subsidized by am ‘across the board’ tax on earnings. No exemptions. You may enroll, in addition, to any private healthcare service(s) you wish, but you are not exempt from funding the ‘universal’ system.

    9) Everyone shall have an irrevocable right to personal privacy, be it ‘physical’ (not being surveilled ‘in person’, or through the monitoring of their activities in any ‘virtual’ space (i.e. online or through monitoring of the location of a device associated with them, i.e. a cellular telephone)

    10) You may have as many firearms as you wish. Ammunition may only be purchased from a police station. =)

      2. Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure it should be prohibited like that… some good folks make it work (I know of several). It’s kind a lottery, but then isn’t everything? I don’t think you should be restricted from playing once you are past puberty and can make your own decisions. =)

        1. Well, I also don’t think you should get a job until you’re 42. This was the age I told everyone when I was about 10. Sadly, I ended up working in my teens. My plans don’t work out.

          1. Your 10-year-old self sounds quite like she had done quite a lot of forward planning! When I was 10 I was unconcerned with anything other than the next twelve-ish months (that were guaranteed to include a birthday and a Christmas)!

      3. Minimum of 30 years old for men if the couple wants kids. It does not matter how old the woman is (assume>20) because she will be more mature than than man anyhow.

        If no kids, then marriage should be optional and the state should recognize the couples’ financial binding similar to married couples.

        1. I once said something similar to my wife, that women tend to be more mentally mature.

          She said “You don’t know many women, do you?”.

          I bowed to her greater wisdom.

  64. As the manager of a movie theater, I have this one: people who buy a soda or popcorn must take the cup or bag out of the auditorium at the end of the show and place it in the basket provided. Customers who have traveled abroad tell me that in other countries this is taken for granted. I mean, HOW HARD IS IT FOR AN ADULT TO PICK UP A PAPER CUP!? Yes, I’m yelling, but you try picking up after these slobs for 30 years.

    Also, people who talk during the film (“He’s walkin’ down the street . . .now he’s gonna open the door”) shall be branked (look it up). I know it’s hard for you to believe, but your neighbors really don’t need you to explain the film.

  65. I would make it illegal for non working seniors to be using the roads at peak travel times unless they were on route to the hospital. Why should they be on the road when people are trying to get to work or take their children to school? Getting a jump on senoir discount day for Depends and Fixodent is something that should be done on non peak traffic times. I would be willing to pay a fee along with the driver’s licence renewal fee to reward senoirs who agree not to be on the roads during busy times.
    I also would make sure that pastor’s residences would be taxed at the same rate as a comparable residence. That would be high on the priority list.
    I would remove the under god recent innovation to the pledge.
    Then I would remove the pledge.

    1. I would make it illegal for non working seniors to be using the roads at peak travel times unless they were on route to the hospital. Why should they be on the road when people are trying to get to work or take their children to school? Getting a jump on senoir discount day for Depends and Fixodent is something that should be done on non peak traffic times.

      That’s just cruel.

        1. You mean aside from your snarky Fixodent and Depends “humor?”

          Seniors are people too, with lives and activities that matter very much to them. They have dreams, goals, needs….heck, many of them are still employed. Many are also some of our most selfless volunteers, providing services without which the lives of countless others would be significantly diminished.

          You will one day be a senior–how would you like to be regarded as nothing but an annoyance, someone whose existence is unimportant? Do you not have (or have you never had) elderly family members you cherish? While you’re at it, why don’t you just wish they’d hurry up and die?

    2. So your solution is to have cops pulling seniors over during rush hour to ask them if they have a job? That won’t snarl traffic…not one bit. Better idea would be to have all schools start at 5:30 A.M., you know, before rush hour begins? I’m up at that time, I’m sure others could get their kids out of the house by then.

      1. Studies show that children really need their sleep and they do poorly without it. Not just poorer grades but more trouble with truancy and disruptive behavior.

        It would probably be a better idea to start school at 10:00, get out at 3:00 or 3:30, have a 35 minute lunch and extend the school year an extra 2 or 3 weeks.

        I would make a new holiday and call it:

        Tardigrade day.

        1. I like these hours for work hours & I think truancy and disruptive behaviour occurs in sleepy adults too!

          1. Actually, the 25-hour work week you describe would do wonders for unemployment and underemployment.

            But it’d only work if we required the 1% to pay for it, rather than trying to squeeze the 99% even harder….

            b&

      2. The police force does not have to pull seniors over during rush hour to ask them if they have a job. The police currently do not pull everyone over to spot check if there is open booze in the car. They must have this little thing called probable cause. There are times when they set up roadblocks for this very reason, but it stands to reason it is always on drinking holidays. At least it is here in Chicago.
        I think driving into the parking lot of the local big box retailer is probable cause.
        So seniors can clog up the roadways during peak travel times to save some bucks while people who have to be on time to this little triffle called work can get there.
        Only people who own or operate day care and after care centers would like your idea about a school start time that early.
        Nevermind what our Chicago teachers union would say about that, when many of them have children that they also have to take to school.

    3. I would remove the under god recent innovation to the pledge.
      Then I would remove the pledge.

      This is almost perfect. Remove *god* from currency simultaneously and you have a nice tidy package of emotional control mechanisms dispensed with.

  66. How can you hate on coriander? I don’t want to live in that world.

    A world where raw tomato isn’t part of a salad, on the other hand…

      1. Have you tried cutting all the stems off it before preparing it for a numerous amount of things?

        1. Doesn’t work. It’s the chemical that makes the flavor that most of us like in cilantro. Short of removing all the flavor …

  67. Congrats, Jerry, you are one of the few persons I have run across who understands the difference between “fewer” (number) and “less” (amount or volume). Ex-jocks who become sports announcers are the worst offenders. They should all be required to go back to school and take a grammar class before being allowed on air. I also hate the constant use of “myself” instead of “me” or “I” (or another more appropriate noun or pronoun).

    1. I would outlaw the (currently increasing) use of (the objectifying) “people that” instead of the correct “people WHO.”

      1. There’s no grammatical foundation for the belief that it’s incorrect to refer to a person as a “that” (“the man that I marry,” “the girl that married dear old dad,” and so on. In fact, “that” has been in use as a pronoun with a human antecedent for a long time, as R.W. Burchfield points out in his lengthy discussion in THE NEW FOWLER’S MODERN ENGLISH USAGE (1996). The OED cites Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif using it this way, and it includes citations from writers in every century since then. So there’s clearly room for exception. What’s more, some constructions seem to work better with “that.”

        A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, by Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans, says, “’That’ has been the standard relative pronoun for about eight hundred years and can be used in speaking of persons, animals, or things.

        1. Well, perhaps one should start saying,

          “That do you think you are?”,

          instead of,

          “Who do you think you are?”

          After all, if enough or most people get in the habit of saying “that,” who is anyone to dispute them? (Same with, ” ‘Myself’ went to the store.”) 😉

      2. I do that all the time. I think it’s because while I’m writing I change my mind part way through & never fix it. I don’t think I make this mistake when talking.

        1. It’s not a mistake. It’s a mistake to think it’s a mistake.

          The “Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage” points out that “that” is our oldest general relative pronoun. It was (and still is) regularly and properly used to refer to persons as well as to things in our earliest literature.

          1. I also like using English how I want. A lot of grammar rules don’t make sense & no one speaks the way to rules say we should.

          2. That would be because spoken and written English are two entirely different (though certainly related) languages. Read Mark Twain for a superlative example of the distinction.

            Speaking as you write or writing as you speak is is inappropriate as wearing scrubs on a construction site or jeans in an operating room.

            Cheers,

            b&

          3. Also, I can’t see when I’m writing – at least not well because of my neck hurting. I tend to try not to lean in too close and who knows what my fingers put on the screen. Maybe I have alien hand syndrome.

          7. As the estimable Steven Pinker writes, in Slate:

            “Rules of proper usage are tacit conventions. Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things—not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, the Gregorian calendar, and paper currency are familiar examples.

            “The conventions of written prose represent a similar kind of standardization. Countless idioms, word senses, and grammatical constructions have been coined and circulated by the universe of English speakers, and linguists capture their regularities in the “descriptive rules”—that is, rules that describe how people speak and understand. A subset of these conventions has become accepted by a virtual community of literate speakers for use in nationwide forums such as government, journalism, literature, business, and academia. These are “prescriptive rules”—rules that prescribe how one ought to speak and write in these forums. Examples include the rules that govern agreement and punctuation as well as fine semantic distinctions between such word pairs as militate and mitigate or credible and credulous. Having such rules is desirable—indeed, indispensable—in many arenas of writing. They lubricate comprehension, reduce misunderstanding, provide a stable platform for the development of style and grace, and credibly signal that a writer has exercised care in crafting a passage.”

          8. That’s fine, and continue to use whatever suits you. “People that” always grates with me and I’ll continue to wince at it, along with what I consider the misuse of “less.”

            In general I think life’s too short for quibbling about some of these grammatical disagreements. But if only the “singular they” was as widely excused as some of these other terms–that’s one I’m entirely for, as sexist language really colors meaning, no matter how much some protest the fact.

    2. About “less” and “fewer,” in fact (as I’ve noted earlier here),it’s not quite so simple as you think. When “count nouns” may be perceived as mass nouns, then “less” is fine. The history of the usage makes that plain. That’s why it’s a fussy mistake to squawk about “10 items or less.”

      “Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage” says this: “Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault — it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.”

      Also:

      “The idea that less can’t be used with count nouns isn’t well supported; it’s a rule that hasn’t ever been strictly followed, especially for count nouns that can be perceived as masses. Groceries lend themselves to perception as a mass, so it’s no surprise that “10 items or less” is favored now, just as it has been historically.”

      From: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/

    3. Well, if you want to use correct English, you should not use “then” when you mean “than”! Then you could use either “less than” or “fewer than”, according to the mood you’re in!

  68. Kicked out for being 1 item over in the 10 items or less line?

    I don’t know if I should get down on my knees and worship Mr. Dennett or excoriate him as a brown shirt jack booted thug!

    Serving cilantro in any restaurant should result in a public flogging and incarceration of the chefs (and restaurant owners) family. It’s important to get your priorities straight.

    They still take checks where Mr. Dennett is from?
    Few grocery stores (or other stores) takes checks here.

    In my perfect world:

    Author George R. R. Martin would be forbidden to write anything until he finishes Game Of Thrones.

    Dean Koontz would not be allowed to write at all.

    Guantanamo Bay would have all it’s prisoners transferred to state side high security prisons. Those who pose no danger and have no reason for being there would be compensated (as much as possible) as would their families. They would be given the choice to move to the USA with their immediate family and given a formal apology. If they get caught committing any terrorist act they and their family will be executed.

    Ted Nugent would be forced to live up to his promise about being dead or in prison. Not to say I want him (or anyone else) dead, but the racist little troll promised and it’s high time he made good.

    Fox “News” would lose it’s broadcasting license.

    Glenn Beck would be given the choice of being committed to an institution for the criminally insane (the same place they put The Riddler, The Penguin, Two Face and the other comic book insane villains) or Guantanamo Bay. As would Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and Friends.

    A number of liquid thorium reactor designs would be fast tracked in the USA and Canada in the same way the A Bomb was during the second world war, except without the secrecy.

    I too would require solar panels on new buildings, and solar water heating for buildings that need any significant amount of hot water.

    Glenn Beck should be given a tiny white board or chalk board, but no writing implements. His only reading material should be Obama’s ‘Dreams from my Father’ and ‘My Life’ by Bill Clinton.

    1. Ted Cruz should join Glenn Beck in that assylum. Rand Paul should join Ted Nugent. Bobby Jindal and others should be sent back to grade school to get an education.

  69. “We don’t own our children, and to put it bluntly, we have no right to misinform them.”

    An interesting thought. It seems to be the tradition in our culture that parents have a grat deal of say in how they raise their children. Lately I have been curious as to how much overlap there is between this view and the “personhood begins at conception” view. It seems to me that believing a zygote is a “person” is not compatible with the view that children are essentially the property of their parents. I don’t know if anyone has done any serious polling as to the prevalence of this overlap.

    1. While it is, indeed, an interesting thought…the forced-birth crowd, though they often coopt the modern language of liberalism, are instead all about enforcing their Biblical property rights to women and children. (For the archetypal example, see the Ten Commandments, which explicitly equates wives with property which shall not be coveted.) Thus, though they would use legal trickery to grant personhood to blastocysts, they would abscond for themselves the personal rights they would manufacture.

      Cheers,

      b&

  71. Proper signal timing would be implemented at all intersections. No more sitting at a 3 minute light while looking at one a quarter mile ahead that is green for precisely no one, only to be red when you finally make it there.

    1. Yes!

      Once you’re stopped by a red light, you should be able to drive the speed limit (or slightly slower) for the rest of the time you’re on that road and never be stopped again by another red light. Couple that with intelligent speed limit signs that adjust the speed as needed to accommodate traffic volume and the like, and we could save so much in wasted fuel and pollution it’s not even funny.

      Come to think of it, I’d probably also require that all desk jobs be done by telecommuting. If you’re not physically making or moving a product or service, there’s no good reason for your physical presence at any particular location that can possibly justify the societal cost in pollution and exhaustion of finite resources — at least, not in the Information Age. Yes, bosses stuck in the buggy-whip mindset don’t know how to manage employees and will be afraid that workers will slack off if the boss isn’t watching over their shoulders. But you should be paying your employees to get shit done, not to be busy, so it’s only incompetent managers who will object to telework.

      Cheers,

      b&

    2. Some cities have properly timed lights but those that don’t just enrage me. I’m sure it correlates with increased accidents and road rage when people snap!

    3. Well, they can’t all be timed that way (without tweaking speed limits all over the place or moveing the roadways — neither of which is very practical.)

      That said: Main thoroughfares should all have proper timing, based on time of day, to allow for the efficient commuting of the bulk of the people. (Some will always be going croass-wise or against the main flow.)

      1. Actually, one of the hot new things in traffic engineering is dynamic speed limit signs. I don’t think they’re deployed very many places, but they can, in principle and in hope, do exactly what you wish — especially when coupled with even very rudimentary traffic volume / speed equipment.

        b&

      2. Well, yeah, that’s my point. There’s major roads all over the place where signal timing would help. It’s a thing of beauty to watch all the lights on the Avenues turn sequentially green. Plus, certain cross streets are reasonably well timed as well. Grid systems, one way streets, properly timed signals and roundabouts can all greatly increase traffic control.

        Of course, if I really ruled the world, this would all be combined with more R&D on self-driving cars. Take out the human error and pathetic reaction times and we can cut down on travel time, fatalities, and overall anger. All this could be had with an intelligently designed system (oh, and ensure no sewage plants near entertainment districts).

  72. Depressing. Dan identified a major problem: indoctrination of children with foolish and superstitious ideas. Then said he hadn’t a clue as to how the problem could be fixed.

  73. Everything agreed apart from the Cilantro (fresh Coriander leaves) , Jerry. You don’t have to have it if you don’t want it 😉

      1. This happens with corn too. Now I always ask, “does it have corn in it?” and my friends always laugh because they know how I make a face when I get something with niblets in it where niblets don’t belong.

        1. Just for you and Jerry, I’m going to bring a corn and cilantro salad to the next EAC (which doesn’t exist) meeting (which won’t happen).

          Cheers,

          b&

          2. Let’s make it happen but let’s add some beans or something to this mix. I’ll bring the beans.

          3. Actually, black beans, corn, cilantro, and a lime vinaigrette would be just about perfect, especially with some tortillas and salsa….

            b&

          5. You know, it would be interesting to compare population sensitivity to cilantro with regional usage…I’m guessing fewer Mexicans and (Asian) Indians think it taste like soap than, say, northern Europeans.

            b&

  74. I would outlaw “subsequent to” in legal documents, using instead, “after.” (I wonder what the legalese equivalent of “before” is.)

  75. “War-economy” directed to mitigate climate change, and end its causes. (almost like world peace, I know)

    Cilantro will be promoted as the premier fish seasoning! 🙂

  76. The following policy would be implemented:- When people call a store up it would be noted whether it was a local or long distance call. If long distance number, their call will be put on hold until they reach the front of the queue. If they are a local number they will be put on hold for 30mins and then be allowed to join queue. No more will the lazy feckers who can’t even be bothered to walk to the shop get preferential service.

    Secondly:- Peter Hitchens would be forced to wear a clown costume in public at all times.

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