The World According to Nick
My take on Software, Technology, Politics, and anything else I feel like talking about.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The New Kyoto Protocol? 

At first I thought this guy was kidding. The fact that people actually think like this... scares the bejesus out of me:

America is fat and getting fatter. Today 140 million American adults are overweight or obese. Their bodies carry 4 billion pounds of excess fat, the result of eating 14 trillion excess calories.

Numbers of this size belong in the domain of economists, not physicians. And therein lies the solution.
...
Food calories are so pervasively and inexpensively available in our environment that they should be regarded as a pollutant.
...
Public policies have succeeded in reducing air pollution. They can teach us how to reduce calorie pollution. Tradable emission allowances, for example, establish markets where permits to emit air pollutants can be bought and sold. Market forces then provide incentives to reduce pollution emissions.
...
A specific example illustrates how tradable emission allowances could work. Suppose the calorie-emission allowance is set to 100 calories for each ounce of food emitted into the environment (i.e., sold). A four-ounce food item having more than 400 calories could not, therefore, be sold unless "calorie credits" were purchased to cover the excess calories. So a standard four-ounce stick of butter, containing 780 calories, could not enter the marketplace until the butter producer acquired 380 additional calorie-credits from someone having credits to sell.

This is how people would like to run your life. To people like this, you don't have a right to make choices, any choices, on your own. Your body belongs to the government, and doing anything to desecrate it is a crime in this person's mind. I could say a lot worse about him, but frankly, this entire idea is really beyond parody.

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Name: Nick
Home: Wauwatosa, WI, United States

I'm a Software Consultant in the Milwaukee area. Among various geeky pursuits, I'm also an amateur triathlete, and enjoy rock climbing. I also like to think I'm a political pundit.


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