What silly inconvinient stuff would you outlaw if you could?
I'd outlaw sauce bottles which make getting it all out harder, especially the ones which don't have the opening at the bottom and make it impossible to put the bottle with the opening facing downwards.
Displaying any price other than the final price I have to pay inclusive of all fees and charges. I don't care about a number that has some mathematical relationship to what's going to come out of my bank account, just tell me the price. This always annoys me so much when I travel to the US but it's probably like that in a few other places too.
And lying about why something is charged, although it's not silly. A takeaway website I worked for adds "service charge" which is literally just a delivery charge, but hidden, because you only see it during finalization. It doesn't apply to pick-up orders, only delivery. Many websites seem to had adopted it so they can lie about the free delivery.
In the USA, companies like Ticketmaster now have to show the full price upfront, including all taxes and fees. Airlines have had to do it for a little over 10 years, too. I really hope this is enforced for more industries in the future.
If I'm at a physical store, they know the tax rate, so the listed prices should include taxes! Same with a restaurant, more and more of which are hiding nonsense fees.
And multiple different unit prices across brands. It's easy when one product uses per kilo while another uses per 100g, but it's more annoying in the US when one product shows unit pricing per pound while another shows it per ounce.
Also on stoves. "Oh, you wanna turn off a burner? Sorry, your fingers are too wet. Also, I hope you remembered to read the 300 page manual because we've never even heard of intuitive controls"
The controls on my stove are those weird flat buttons you'd see on a lot of late 90's appliances? Like they don't "press" at all but they do respond to pressure so I could preheat my oven with the end of a spoon or something. Those are superior to capacitive touch controls.
My dad's Toyota Avalon has a touch screen for the infotainment center, and the climate controls are a touch-sensitive panel rather than mechanical switches. Which means if you go to wipe dust off the dashboard, you fuck up the air conditioner settings. I don't know what's worse, all the touch controls, or all the chrome on the dashboard scientifically aligned to glint sunlight into your eyes.
There is so much unnecessary advertising in my country. Billboards, commercials on a screen at fuel stations, placards on park benches. None of it has any tangible benefit to regular people. None.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
In the US there are 4 states that have outlawed billboards: Vermont, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii. I absolutely would not complain if it became nationwide.
Broaden this to any ads on the streets. Billboards are the most egregious, but I'd actually kill for a society where I can get from my home to a grocery with nothing trying to sell me something.
I am okay with the business itself having signage on its property visible from far enough away for travelers to make navigational decisions. I'm also okay with those state-issued signs on large highways that point out things like lodging, fuel and food which must conform to certain guidelines. And in this case, I'd prefer using clear and distinctive logos which are recognizable by color and shape so that motorists can recognize them faster and spend more of their attention on the road.
I'm ambivalent on this one. If the ad on a building serves to keep the charges from tenants lower then I don't mind (given the ad is somewhat tasteful). Ads for the sake of ads? Yea, fuck that.
I disagree with the requirement for plain labels. Trademarks exist for consumer protection as well as business protection; I want Gatorade to hold a trademark on clear bottles with lightning bolts on the front and orange caps, because I don't want to be fooled into buying Negligent Uncle Greg's Geterade. If anything, I would force companies to use fewer of them; no hosing Amazon with 900,000 differently branded permutations of the same product.
Single-use plastic packaging! All packaging now comes in a set of standard ISO sizes and satisfying some engineering constraints and requirements. You get a Coke from a convenience store - it comes as a 0.5L glass bottle. You finish with it, put it on a rack inside the store with all the other empty 0.5L bottles to be taken back to the factory to be washed and inspected for chips and reused. It could be filled with Pepsi next time! Just slap on a new paper label.
I wouldn't call it a silly issue myself. I'd ban all plastic packaging unless proven to have no alternative. I'm also infiuriated with countries for making easily recyclable materials actively hard to recycle: speaking of glass. They make it so you have to take it to a recycling point, which can be sparse depending on your idea. Glass and metals are amazing for recycling. But no, make everything plastic and actively push people away from purchasing glass by making them have to go out of their way to recycle it. Plastic bottles frequently aren't even better. I had multiple plastic sauce bottles break akin to glass and leak out.
Yes! Which is why my idea is to have a collection point at every point of sale. And the first aim will be to reuse the packaging, not even recycle it (melt it down)! This is why ISO standardization is necessary - you don't want to keep track of Coke bottles and Pepsi bottles, they need to be identical. The same truck that delivers a pallet of bottles from the factory to your store will take the pallet of empties out.
Here in Finland we have a really extensive and efficient plastic bottle and aluminum can recycling system. Every bottle and can has a deposit (0.40 € for large bottles, 0.20 € for small bottles, 0.15 € for cans) and you can cash them by returning them at any store. Just toss them in a machine.
There's even some hypermarkets where you can just pour in a giant bag full of bottles or cans and the machine sorts and prices the things automatically.
It's super annoying we still can't really do the same for rest of the single use plastic, but at least trash sorting and recycling what can be recycled is a thing everywhere. We have a lot of projects that aim to reduce those. Probably the coolest recent thing was that someone came up with all-carton coffee cups. (I hope they catch on so we can get rid of the cups that have the Sad Turtle Warning. I don't want turtles to be sad, they're awesome.)
That's great! Our supermarkets have bottle deposit machines too, and even at only $0.05 deposit per bottle they are widely used. However, the poor people using them mostly obtain the bottles by rifling through apartment complex recycling bins on garbage day (all residents are already required to separate plastic from garbage).
Moreover I don't believe plastic is actually recycled. My city has started burning 90% of its incoming plastic stream and still calls it "recycling"! That's still fossil carbon coming out of the ground and ending up in the atmosphere, you doofuses! The minor fraction of plastic that IS recycled is either downcycled into lower quality items like plastic planks for outdoor decks, or mixed with at least 50% virgin plastic material if making new plastic bottles. There is currently no way to 100% recycle plastic into the same type of item AFAIK, because the polymer molecules chemically degrade.
When I think about recycling I want to think in terms of "is this kind of lifestyle sustainable for 100 years? for 1000 years?" Taking fossil carbon out of the ground is not sustainable. Aluminum and glass are recyclable 100%! Can we do even better with reuse?
There is a store near me that sells illegally-imported African coke. It comes in a bottle that looks beat up to shit, but that's because the bottle was probably used hundreds of times, since in the African country they actually reuse the bottle. It's still perfectly fit for purpose though! We just need to relax our expectations for how "pristine" we want our product packaging to look.
I heard a great talk with Sian Sutherland on plastic reduction recently, specifically around brand agnostic standardized metal bottles: https://youtu.be/jTs6KejhSg4?feature=shared
Everything should be glass or aluminum. Preferably aluminum since you don't really have to worry about mixtures and cleaning it, you just melt it down and reshape it. With glass, you have to separate out the different types, and it still breaks down each recycle, I believe, since they mix silica with other compounds to make different kinds of glass.
I honestly don't understand stand why plastic beverage bottles are still a thing. Cans work perfectly. And if you insist on bottles, they can make aluminum cans too.
Aluminium cans need a plastic lining to prevent corrosive drinks from eating through them and/or to prevent the aluminium from leeching into your drink.
I want the recent Dutch law on single use plastics to be significantly rewritten.
So they passed a law, requiring sellers to charge people for single use plastic containers. Sounds cool, right? Well, the law has some problems:
the seller is allowed to set the surcharge to be as high as they want it to be.
the seller may keep the money from the surcharge
the seller is not required to offer an alternative
the seller can refuse to honour people's request for them using their own packaging
So effectively, they'll set the surcharges to be as low as they can, and don't bother allowing anyone to use alternatives. If you go to a snack bar, ask for a serving of fries, and offer your own bowl to put them in, the seller can just tell you "NOPE"
So I think the law should be retooled to cover these issues. The prices should be set from above, the money should go to the state, and the seller must honour customers' requests for using their own packaging alternatives.
the seller can refuse to honour people’s request for them using their own packaging
Preposterous! How are we expected to reduce our consumption of single use containers if we are not allowed to use anything else?
I've had great success bringing my own sealable glass bowls when I want to get takeout and they eyeball out the regular size portion for me. But here currently it's only possible on an ad-hoc basis, by asking as a favor as a regular, since it's just not part of custom. It would be great if bring-your-own-container was protected and encouraged by law!
My city passed a plastic bag ban recently and I was skeptical about it at first but it actually has been a great help. Not even so much in banning the bags themselves, but in changing the culture and expectations. Now it feels perfectly normal to bring in your own canvas bags to shop because everyone does it, whereby before you'd look like a weirdo for doing it.
Some countries (at least Australia, USA, and many European countries) have deposits on bottles and cans where you pay a deposit of somewhere between 5 and 40 cents (depending on country) when you buy the drink, and get the deposit back when you return it to a store or recycling center for recycling. Reusing instead of recycling would be the next logical step there.
There are actually some companies in the USA that reuse bottles, Straus Family Creamery being one of the more well-known ones at least in my area. They charge a $3 deposit per milk bottle. When you return the bottle to the store, you get your $3 back and the store returns it to Straus. They put the returned bottles in crates and the delivery drivers pick up the old bottles when they drop off the new ones.
The last part is made more complicated by having different tax rates on different items in different places at different times.
You see a national ad for Walmart with a widget on sale. Depending on what city and state you buy it, the price will change because the tax rates are different between and even within jurisdictions.
Maybe the Walmart you go to has a development agreement where they pay higher local tax as a way to cover the infrastructure project the City has to complete to support the building. Or maybe it's the opposite and Walmart built a bunch of streets an utilities they dedicated to the City and now they don't pay sales tax to the local jurisdiction.
Or maybe on September 1st sales tax rates changed in the middle of an ad campaign. Or maybe there's an additional tax exemption due to a Development Agreement.
Or maybe that kayak is no longer taxed at the time sale because you bought a trolling motor at the same time and now it's classified as a motor boat and the customer pays state sales tax when they register it with the state?
It's really, really difficult to predict taxes when you've for so many wacky jurisdictional issues that affect the tax rate.
I think if a company gets large enough to cover multiple jurisdictions, then you can expend the cost to figure that all out. If anything it might make it harder for these mega companies. Screw em. They make plenty of profit. They'll adapt.
Separately, more consistent taxation would be nice.
Half of the scenarios you noted are not ones I have ever heard of (and I would bet are totally made up). Why would WalMart shoppers be exempt from sales tax?
You are right that advertising price with tax may be unreasonable. That does not preclude the store from putting the price with tax on the shelf. Out of all the scenarios you described, the only one that this would not cover is having an item be taxed differently if bought in conjunction with another item, but that can be noted in the same way that stores note a bundle or a bulk sales price ($1 each or 5 for $4).
There is difficulty in the case of a charge in tax rate (how often do those happen? Once every few years) or if there is a tax holiday (I see plenty of clothing stores have a sign for "15% off the marked price"). Those can be handled by having computer controlled shelf prices, which have existed for at least 20 years but never caught on much.
It also leads to worse service. US dining is fuckin tedious. Every 5 minutes someone harasses you, doing the fake smile thing, etc
In my country you just shout if you need something, or there's just a bing-bong button on the table. they leave you alone unless you ask, and you pay only what's on the bill
I do appreciate when a worker in a restaurant has a legitimate conversation and is social, if they can see when it's appropriate and welcomed. And to add context, I'm not talking about the waiter hovering like you're describing, I'm talking about something I've only ever seen from immigrant family restaurants where they've come from a culture where eating is still a social community activity, or possibly when a chef takes pleasure in knowing you're enjoying their experience. The always transactional nature of eating in society has started to annoy me. But it's very different to when someone is being paid to try and make your experience good, that's inevitably plastic and coerced.
It's a fair point that it can be racist and sexist. I'm sure the attractive get paid more. After all, strippers are the ultimate in tipped workers. They have to pay for the opportunity to work for tips.
We do need to get over this "poor tipped workers", though.
There's a reason why no tipping restaurants end up failing and returning to tips.
It's because you make much more in tips than you'd make otherwise.
It's like no one has ever worked for tips and honestly calculated what they made.
I worked for tips in high school. I didn't make that much money again until people started calling me doctor.
Yeah, you can't have tipping and no tipping side by side. Customers will like the appearance of lower prices and many front house workers will make bank. I've worked back of house and front and worked twice as hard and actually used culinary skills in the back and made less than I did receiving tips in the front. I think that's pretty messed up. The post was about making things illegal. I think most forms of tipping should be. That levels the playing field.
That article says the workers are unhappy with their $30 per hour because the restaurant is only open part-time so they're not getting the hours they need to make a good wage. The restaurant plans to open full time though
It doesn't support your argument in any way whatsoever
How do restaurants in every single other country survive then, according to your theory?
You're probably not serious, but I wrote this it out, so I'll post it:
The difference is that smokers actively blow smelly air out, whereas perfume is just a passive (if smelly) thing on one's body. To ban perfume would be more similar to banning people who smoke (even if they're not actively smoking) because the smoke lingers in their hair and clothes, and that opens up the door to banning construction workers because they might smell sweaty, farmers because they might smell like manure, or preschool teachers because they might smell like baby spit/vomit. Let's just ban smoking as an activity.
Can't wait until they pass a law banning "smoking within 10m of another person outdoors" so we can play "chase the smoker!" game and they have to run away from us or face a fine.
Please don't. I live in an apartment building and my neighbor loves to smoke in his flat which blows into my flat. During the summer I have the choise between being baked alive or second hand smoking two packs a day. Take that shit outside, away from people
Bottled water can be useful in emergencies and disaster situations, but they should be treated like other emergency items/rations. People should use reusable containers as much as possible, and the companies should NOT get to suck up all the water they want for free.
I'm not advocating for capital punishment, I'm just saying that if we lynch a couple of daytime pop radio hosts for siren-like noises then it will probably go away pretty quickly.
The other day I had a song come on Spotify in which a part of the beat sounded like the cars warning beep. But it was not the right speed to be door or seat belt alarm, so I figured it had to be some else like tire pressure or engine warning... Mother fucker was part of a song and kept me looking for warning lamps blinking for a good minute or so.
I want to throw in doorbells with this (but only as a misdemeanor)
I use Pluto.tv for background noise at night. Amazon is now running some 'Prime Deal Days' ads and one of them has a very prominent doorbell sound that wakes my ass up everytime.
Plenty of time, it's not calm music. You'll have people blasting TikTok pop, rap, hardcore techno, or other attacks against ears. In a place where the whole point to go there is to be in nature.
I heavily disagree, because it puts judgement into the hands of the masses.
But a photo should be proof enough and if the government (whoever is responsible for issuing fines) confirms it is illegal then the owner of the vehicle gets a fine - and whoever reported it gets 10% of it! Imagine how much money could be raised that way to improve schools and stuff!
Also parking too close to a street corner. Technically illegal but very rarely enforced. It is a real safety hazard since, instead of being able to stop at the stop line and see perpendicular traffic, and driver has to enter the intersection to see (and then have their line of sight blocked by a parked vehicle in the perpendicular direction).
It also makes large vehicles like large trucks and busses take turns very wide.
So many people are unaware of this rule. I would that all no parking areas like this and for hydrants have the curb painted a bright colored with the words "no parking". Why make people guess?
Car locks that trigger the horn and lights. Whatever asshole engineer decided that was a good idea (instead of just making the key fob blink or something) clearly has never had neighbors.
The keyfob already has two way communication for the challenge-response protocol, so it is perfectly possible for the car to send a signal back saying it was actioned.
Or the stupidly sensitive car alarms that react to the slightest movement (ahem BWM and Audi and Mercedes)
Everytime I take a ferry those vehicles are blaring their alarms for the entire trip and they need to announce on the P.A for the owner to come back and turn the alarm off.
Life pro tip, if you leave your car on the ferry, don't turn your alarm on!
It doesn't trigger the horn on UK cars, which I definitely appreciate. Although it was amusing to watch my partner jump every time I locked our hire car in the USA, the noise pollution is unnecessary.
Ha, I was thinking that I never recalled the sound going off on any car in the UK, but regularly and obnoxiously goes off in China. But nobody gives a shit about noise in China.
Paywall logins that don’t load until you’ve already started reading the article and scrolled down a bit. Show the paywall IMMEDIATELY or don’t have one at all.
Plastic fasteners on socks. They are too short to use scrisors and often damage socks if you don't. Too many times I ended up with damaged brand new socks because getting them out od that plastic trap is too hard for me.
I always choose socks held by cardboard only if available.
I LOVE my Flush Cutters. I got them for vape stuff (making coils and cutting cotton) and now I use them for everything. I have four of them. I don’t know why.
I toss it in the recycling bin on the way back to the house. My sister's ex used to obsess over it, though, and put it in a pile to be shredded. Then he never shredded it. His home office was a hoarders nest with yellowing junk mail everywhere.
Stores having loud speaker boxes pointing to the sidewalks, playing music and announcing products. It probably is illegal in well developed countries, but not mine. It's annoying af
It is hereby declared that the use or operation of any radio device or apparatus or any device or apparatus for the amplification of sounds from any radio, phonograph or other sound-making or sound-producing device, or any device or apparatus for the reproduction or amplification of the human voice or other sounds, in front of or outside of any building, place or premises, or in or through any window, doorway or opening of such building, place or premises, ... is detrimental to the health, welfare and safety of the inhabitants of the city. ... It shall be unlawful for any person to use or operate any sound device or apparatus in, on, near or adjacent to any public street, park or place, for commercial and business advertising purpose.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen ALL THE TIME in some parts of town.
No longer will that fucking line up for coffee reach down the road and over the horizon in the morning. The sitting there for twenty minutes, idling your car as you watch the person in front of you park in the middle of the intersection like an asshole. No.
Go, park, use the magic of being a biped.
Now there's no excuse. You either drink the coffee at work, or face that Starbucks barista you know secretly hates you. Biped your way in the door, get your morning fix with confidence because fuck mark, no barista is going to ruin your day.
Not while I'm there banning drive throughs to ruin it for you.
Edit: Barista. I don't even know what a batista is but could potentially be a bad ass.
Thru is a word only in the sense that kleen, kwik, kut, tuff, chik, nite, lite, tho, etc are words. It's called cacography or eye dialect and is the result of marketing and advertising agencies not being able to copyright common phrases. When the terms enter colloquial language, they're still used but not copyrighted as the incorrect spelling still draws your attention.
Ooh! Packaging that is deceptively large. For example, it should be illegal to sell a 6 inch tall tube of deodorant that's only got three inches of deodorant in it.
Back when I was a teen my first job was at a grocery store. One of the best parts of that job was getting away from all the chaos and collecting carts. Just my 2 cents.
Manufacturers not taking responsibility of their waste not just of manufacturing but after what they produced hits the garbage dumps. I think if you make something, you should be responsible for un-making its physical world impact.
I have a lot of medications like this: huge boxes containing one pill bottle and 60% air. Why??? Also, injection meds that have "display boxes" like they are high end Samsung electronics.
Going off OP's thought--the pump or spray bottles whose design and/or straw length makes it literally impossible to get the last bit of product out. I've had some where the straw just plain ends about 1/2" from the bottom so there was never even a chance to use all the product you paid for.
The worst part is I've also used spray bottles that--through very minor design tweaks--enable you to get virtually every speck of liquid. So it's not like it's even hard problem to solve, but fuck you just throw out the last 10% and buy a new bottle!
I had that with some medication. It was a pain killer and muscle relaxant that was in a bottle with a drip opening. The last ml refused to stop out so I took the bottle and sucked the rest out. Well that was more than the usual dose of that medication. I was lying in my bed barely able to move. But I never felt so relaxed
I'd like those "essential oil vaporizer" machines fucking banned. Turn that stinky shit OFF Karen...no one wants to smell your "Eucalyptus and Menthol" fighting it out with Patricia's "Orange and Coconut" and Jenny's "Lilacs and Lavender".
It should be illegal to scan or redeem your lotto tickets before 9am. Some people are just trying to get to work, but nooope, gotta wait behind the superstitious lady who only wants every second scratch&win with a serial number that ends in 2 or some crap.
Not trivial, but health care providers should be forced to publish an easily accessible price list of all their services and procedures so we can comparison-shop. I'm so sick of being told I can't know the price until they find out what insurance will pay.
Theoretically that's already a thing, but much like with ISPs consumer guide labels or other transparency obligations having it on page 42 of your website that you have to navigate to through some crazy path is considered good enough.
Ban corporations from being able to interpret the law as they see fit.
They either follow the law according to their customers and the government's interpretation or they don't get to operate at all and the company gets nationalized.
The fact that corporations are allowed to do that is the root of all of our legal problems.
People who pull out of parking lots onto roads without stopping. Pedestrian deaths are on a steep incline and this recent behavior is absurdly impatient and unsafe.
If I were a traffic cop, I would go fucking nuclear on this shit. I would exaggerate the fuck out of those tickets. I'd aim for you to never have a driver's license again.
Same with people who don't properly use passing lanes, and same for people who tailgate.
All of you are fucking ridiculous, and I hope you lose your privilege to drive an automobile over something small so it makes you as irrationally angry as your behaviors make me.
Just to add, you should never have less than 1 full car length per 10mph you're traveling between you and the car in front of you. Generally it should be like, double that.
Can you please clarify what you mean? I just want a better understanding of what driving conditions we're talking about. Are these parking lots where it's like a strip mall with one row of parking spots directly in front of the building and you back directly into a road, or are we talking about people gunning it going forward without looking?
Yeah, sure. Like, someone finished fueling up, and they are driving toward the gas station's exit into the road which the gas station lives on.
As they approach the exit, they realize that if they dont stop, they can beat the incoming traffic, so they high tail it out of the gas station to beat the incoming cars without stopping.
You are required by law to stop before entering a motorway to ensure entry is safe. People are skipping the stop and making a judgement call as they approach the place the law requires them to stop, and are instead treating it like it's a highway on ramp/yield.
This has been the cause of a fuck ton of pedestrian injury and death (especially since ~2010 when Obama kinda by mistake made huge heavy cars the most appealing option for automakers when he was trying to force automakers to make more fuel efficient cars [thanks, Obama!]), as these impatient fucks are generally looking at the road and not the sidewalk.
Doesnt have to be a gas station. Any similar circumstance.
While I agree with your point, OP specified “silly inconvenient stuff”. I think behavior that can result in serious injury or death is a little bit outside the scope of the question.
Just to add, you should never have less than 1 full car length per 10mph you're traveling between you and the car in front of you. Generally it should be like, double that.
Yes, but also if you are in the left lane on a highway it's also your responsibility to get out of said lane if someone is becoming closer than this behind you.
No, it is your responsibility to get out of the passing lane once you have safely passed the traffic you are passing, provided the left lane is a passing lane. It is not a passing lane when there is a left exit ahead.
The driver behind you should never have any bearing on the decisions you make as a driver unless they've got flashing lights.
Postman must knock and wait 5 minutes for you to answer the door by law. If you have proof that they didn't knock or wait the required time they must redeliver the parcel by way of barbershop quartet at a time that is convenient for you.
Would maybe work in some places. I at least get the angle of encouraging people to order online less, if this were the situation I think more people would prefer to buy things from brick and mortar stores if they could find it. But in areas with car dependency problems it'd make life worse, particularly if the company decides it's not profitable enough to put a package vault in a town or in reasonable distance of it, which I could absolutely see happening in rural areas of non-densely populated places.
Postmen tend to be extremely overworked and underpaid. Many are paid per parcel delived and your idea would probably kill the job of delivery all together. Unless you plan to increase the postmen workforce by 700% and also reintroduce slavery I see no way why anyone would do that.
Since you said silly and inconvenient I'll keep from more serious propositions and say:
App/login pestering. Large fines for each individual exposed to it. Even most corporations would hesitate to do it.
Also every narrative work (book/movie/game/comic/whatever) would have to have a legally registered "estimated number of installments" with a set ending written the moment it gets published. Going past the limit and publishing more installments to that media would incur fines that would start high, and grow by powers of ten with every extra installment.
You wrote a trilogy of movies with a nice satisfying ending? Good good. Enjoy making money off of it. But if you make a sequel or prequel you'll have to pay 1 billion dollars. Extended universe? Ten billion. One hundred billion. A trillion.
Gonna be honest, a system that governs narrative works sounds like something from an orwellian dystopia, in which, ironically, the protagonist would publish a story, do a follow up because of public demand and end up being executed behind the chemical shed
Oh, I would require measurements in inches (or cm) of waist, hip, rise, inseam for women's pants. You cannot just call it a "6" or whatever, I am outlawing those sizes.
I wouldn't ban them, though. I would enforce a law that forces any cash sum for an in-game item to be reversible. If you pay $5 for a hat, you should also be able to sell a hat for $5, and have that money arrive within your account within 24 hours. Any company with a market cap that allows for payment to occur for at least 10 people that are operating microtransations would be forced to oblige.
That way, we either see full in-game currencies where effort is rewarded with real money, or the immediate erasure of microtransations.
We'll also see the "rental" market for videos disappear overnight, because suddenly you can trade in that copy of Shrek 2 you rented from Prime Video for a crisp $15.
Hell, any item you pay for should be returnable within 30 days, at least. Good luck selling a fucking Ultimate Team pack to children, EA! Once they see that pack is full of shite they'll sell the contents back to you. Even worse, the lucky bastards that get a shiny Cristiano Ronaldo will sell for thousands.
Either you build a legitimate financial market, or you don't make money off of shit people don't want.
Pleather or faux leather or whatever they call it. You have about a year or two before it starts rubbing off on everything you own. Sometimes you don't even realise you're buying it. I wish it didn't exist.
Using stop signs by default is the traffic planning equivalent of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" There are other ways to make junctions safer.
Reading the comments, smiling at the fact that so much people complaining about is already illegal here and not a problem.
Personally. I'd make it illegal to start small talk about the fucking weather. I can see that's raining too. Yes that is annoying. Haha, no I won't put shampoo in my hair on my way home. I don't know when it will stop. Do I look like a meteorologist?
Crime: Slow moving vehicles on main roads during rush hour.
I live in the countryside and tractors, backhoes, harvesters and front lifts, which are all restricted to 30 or 50 km/h, have no business on the main roads during rush hour. Take the back roads or wait until rush hour's over!
It's not uncommon to see the following at 0750, and we're about 15minutes from everything here, a tractor pulling some equipment followed by two semis that are too slow in acceleration to overtake, and too big to squeeze by, followed by 50 or 70 cars of people screaming.
Theoretically slow moving vehicles have to pull over and let the queue behind them pass, but too many don't.
Punishment: I propose that we legalize lynching to some degree. I mean the fear of a roadside beating by a mob armed with travel mugs and fistful of small change, that's sure to keep some of the problem at bay. Further I propose that should the miscreant die from the beating, then nobody should be charged. Unless someone brought larger items like snow shovels or tire irons to the party, in which case the snow shovel wielder could be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
That sounds more like an infrastructure problem to me, your anger might be a bit misdirected. If reasonable transport isn't available you should be angry at your local government instead, if it is available and you choose not to use it then it's a problem of your own making and you should be angry at yourself. You really can't blame someone for using the infrastructure available to move heavy equipment since it's almost certainly not their fault that you're stuck using the same road.
Take the bottle in your hand such that the cap is close to your index finger and thumb and the bottom of the bottle is across from the on your palm. Grab it tight and make sure the cap is on tight. Then use your whole arm to swing the bottle. You want to hold it in front of you and with a lot of force (don't let go, lol) swing it downwards, passing your hips. Use your shoulder a bit, but mostly your elbow joint for movement. Put as much speed into the movement as you can. Repeat five times. The centrifugal force will push the content of the bottle towards the cap. Then you can squirt out the remaining sauce, or take off the cap with all remaining sauce on there e.g. ketchup is non-liquid enough to stay on the cap pretty good.
I've always joked that if we up the speed limit in school zones we'd end up with kids who are either smart enough not to run out into traffic, or strong enough to take on a speeding truck. In either case it would be a win for natural selection.
You may be talking about the same thing I am, just using terminology more common in other parts of the world. By "motorways" are you only talking about highways/interstates? I can absolutely agree with THAT, but if by motorways you mean any roads, that might actually be a nightmare for side roads, residential, etc.
Highway is just another word for a road between places, and interstate is obviously a term local to the few countries that have states and name motorways accordingly. It's that more than one country? Motorway is the more international term.
I don't trust people who don't like oatmeal raisin cookies. And they aren't even really hard to tell from chocolate chip, the texture is completely and visibly different!
If you know you're about to bite into an oatmeal raisin cookie, it's fine. The bigger problem is the fact that they look like chocolate chip cookies and they suck because of disappointment that it ain't chocolate chip.
Raisin anything tbh. I sometimes had them put into my salad. I don't hate myself, I just enjoy healthy stuff sometimes. No need to bully me via raisins. :c
Bringing your bicycle into public transportation. Ride your fucking bicycle or leave it at home. Nobody cares if you're too lazy for that steep bit on your way to work or if you don't want to walk the last bit from the station. You're using up unnecessary much space, gtfo.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but my answer is bicycles. They slow traffic, cause a driving hazard as cars dodge them, and bike lanes take up space that could be used as an additional lane of travel for cars. Some cities around the world are laid out so that bike travel works; American cities are not.
Bikes are great for exercise and should be allowed on tracks and off-road. No vehicle that cannot maintain the speed limit should be allowed on public roads, though. Bicycles should be for exercise, not transportation.
Here in the US, traveling by bike is significantly more dangerous than traveling by car. They'll designated a non protected shoulder of a 55 mph road as a "bike lane". It's ludicrously dangerous and ridiculous and I refuse to bike in them, opting for the sidewalk instead. Commuting by bike is not safe here. I'd like to see bike lanes here in the US that are divided from the rest of the road via a physical barrier. I've only seen that on one occasion and I wish we had more of that here.
I actually believe personal use cars should be banned completely (so not affecting ambulances, taxis, public transport and so on). I don't think it's a silly inconvinient topic though. I spend 20 minutes commuting to work by bike, by a car or a bus it can be even over an hour, due to how inefficient that type of transit is (not to mention it's ecological and health issues).
Glad you live and work in a place where biking is a viable option, but it’s the complete opposite for me. It takes me 20 minutes to drive to work on a route that would take three hours by bike just because of the sheer distance, and there simply are no bus routes out to where I live. Not saying we should stop advocating for better mass transit and bike-friendly urban planning, but just bear in mind your situation is not representative of everyone else’s.
I think realistically you'd have to limit the ban to cities only, at least in the states. We're just too big to not have ANY personal automobiles. There may come a day that changes, but until we're entirely connected by rail or something similar, it's just not a reality.
By your argument, people should not be allowed to live in rural areas. I'm going to use myself as an example. It's about 10 minutes to the nearest grocery store, and a 35 minute drive to the nearest hardware store that carries lumber and sheet goods. Let's say I'm doing improvements on my workshop and I need 20 4x8ft sheets of plywood. I would drive to the store in my full-sized pickup truck, load up the materials I need, and drive them home. On the way back I'm dodging cyclists on my small country road, and the log trucks are driving right down the center of the road because if they stay in their lane, they'll run over a pair of cyclists side by side who are out for a leisurely ride.
What's the alternative when personal automobiles are banned? Should public transit carry all my building materials for me? The cyclists on the road I live on are less inconvenienced by my truck and the log haulers, but at the expense of the people who live here. How do I get my groceries? How do I get to work?
I gather that you haven't ever watched NotJustBikes on YouTube or City Beautiful or "Oh the Urbanity" or "Life Where I'm from" or "Nimesh in Los Angeles" or any of the hundreds of other channels? Please pick one (or many) and watch a few videos. There's so much to learn that you are missing out.
You mentioned youtube channels with "urban" and "city" in the name. I hate cities. I hate the filth, the graffiti, the constant barrage of people invading your personal space, the endless rows of concrete and steel buildings covering what used to be nature. America is a beautiful country that still has plenty of rural areas that people like me can call home. For people like me, cars are a necessity.
As far as cities go, I strongly believe that part of problem with traffic congestion is a lack of space for automobiles. Remove the bike lanes, remove the sidewalks, and convert them into extra lanes of travel for cars.
Guys, poster above is just answering the question as posed! They are wrong of course, but the downvote button is for non-constructive contributions, not for disagreement 😊!