Plastic Bag Bans

This has got to be one of the most horrid trends contributing to the combined laziness and incompetent nature of our current legal system: a ban on plastic bags. That's right, ever since Hippie Central (AKA San Francisco) decided in 2007 to place a ban on the use of plastic bags by supermarkets and chain pharmacies, other locations have been balancing their brains between the notion that it might be an environmentally-friendly idea and the warnings of sane people that it's a moronic idea and following suit would be sheer lunacy.

This week, the Los Angeles City Council teetered over the precipice of lunacy and has voted to ban all plastic bags in the city's supermarkets and stores by 2010.

I'll start this off by actually agreeing that some of the bleeding-heart liberals almost have a valid point when they talk about the evils of the plastic bags. They normally take between 100 and 1,000 years to biodegrade. (More on that later.) And yes, they tend to get caught in trees because of their lightweight nature and they wind up in streams and such and marine animals can eat them and die. While it's easy to say that "the kid who swallows too many marbles shouldn't grow up to have kids of his own" - I'll agree that it's a stretch to apply that logic to the turtles. I don't know how easy it is for a turtle to tell the difference between a fish and a freakin' plastic bag, but let's just pretend that somehow they look the same and it's not very nice to be killing off those poor confused sea creatures. And perhaps we use too many of them - we produce an estimated 500 billion of them a year, worldwide.

Okay, back to calling San Francisco and Los Angeles a bunch of idiots for imposing such ridiculous laws.

First of all, plastic bags were what we'd like to call a scientific and technological breakthrough. The ability to mass-produce a strong yet lightweight product that allows consumers to carry their items while also letting producers/manufacturers package their items was a proud day, in my opinion. Paper bags are often ineffective and unreliable, not to mention bulky and THEY CUT DOWN TREES. That was like one of the best reasons to make an alternative to paper bags in the first place! Doesn't anyone recall that little tree-hugging mantra? I mean there's no reason in arguing over the plastic bags that don't decompose fast enough to create mulch so new trees can grow and prosper is the alternative is just destroying the trees in the first place, right? The only alternative alternative is reusable material bags, which are costly, even bulkier, and require too much forethought to be effective. The likelihood of someone saying "it's time to make a grocery run - I'd better collect up my reusable bags so that I may use them once more at the grocery store" is minimal when compared to "oh dang I need milk right now and I'm passing by a store with milk so let me go and get milk and oh darn I don't have my reusable bag with me so just gimme something for free to carry it in so I'm not paying for another reusable bag that I'll never remember to use."

Secondly, we need to stop creating laws to claim things as obsolete. Remember when cassette tapes were popular and it was the most advanced way to listen to your favorite songs before this new-fangled "compact disc" came into existence? Well once we created the CD, it's not like we decided to ban the use/production of cassette tapes because we have better things now and cassettes are flooding the landfills and don't biodegrade and we need to pass laws to hold the recording industry responsible for this garbage and ban their production of cassettes! If you want to really call the plastic bag obsolete, you need to create something BETTER to REPLACE it. Once we came out with the CD and they were priced competitively and made available in mass amounts - we stopped using cassettes (for the most part). Just like the creation of cheap and effective plastic bags made the paper ones practically obsolete (there were very few paper-bag-choosers during the heyday of plastic baggery), if you want the plastic bag to be gone - a better choice has to come out. It has to fill the SAME NICHE (lightweight, strong, disposable, cheap) though. Reusable bags aren't meant to be cheap or disposable, so it's not a replacement. It's merely an alternative.

Thirdly, this is a freakin' non-issue! Remember how we mentioned that plastic bags normally take between 100 and 1,000 years to biodegrade? Well the point is that they DO BIODEGRADE. There must exist living organisms that can biodegrade plastic bags into compost. Ergo, there must be a way to identify those living organisms and culture them and use them to speed up the process by increasing the amount of those organisms and figuring out optimum conditions necessary to speed the process up exponentially. Oh wait, some 16-year-old kid in Canada already figured that out!

Do you understand how messed up this is now? That instead of pumping a minimal amount of money into a research grant to allow REAL scientists to build upon what some Canadian kid managed to accomplish, thereby creating efficient ways to completely biodegrade TONS of plastic bag material in LITTLE TIME - California cities are working to abolish plastic bags? That doesn't solve the PROBLEM, morons! The PROBLEM is millions of tons of plastic bags that we'd like to biodegrade, not the flow of the plastic bags!

That's as ridiculous as people becoming vegetarians because cows producing methane are causing global warming. The problem is the COWS and the METHANE, not people EATING the cows! If you convince everyone to stop eating cows, then the cows get ignored and continue to screw up the planet with global warming flatulence and WE ALL DIE.

Eat a Steak - Save the World! Remember?

In conclusion, it's just plain and simple stupidity to ban something that's completely legal to purchase or sell. It was insane when Chicago banned foie gras and luckily that's over now. If the following scenario is true, then something has gone horribly wrong and needs to be fixed:

In 2010, you can walk into a Los Angeles supermarket and purchase a container of plastic bags, but you can't have that container of plastic bags put into a plastic bag because that would be against the law.

This is horribly wrong and it needs to be fixed.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree that scientists and entrepreneurs should be investing in the process that we know exists to speed up the biodegrading process of plastic bags? Or would you rather ban a legal product in an effort to ignore the real problem and boast that "at least WE'RE not making the problem worse" rather than work to solve the problem?

(Again, the article about the Canadian teenager who's apparently smarter than the Los Angeles City Council)
(The article about San Francisco being the first in the idiot-city parade)
(The article about Los Angeles joining the idiot-city parade)

Please Digg this article and spread the word that we need science and not insane laws!

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Science Project Battle Royale

Sometimes it takes a lot to get me focused on one thing and one thing alone - focused enough to come up with enough material to write about it, anyway. Sometimes what's even harder is keeping that train of thought either moving forward until I can type it out, or at least pulled into a specific station where I know it will be waiting for me to board once again after rushing about elsewhere.

My mind is often like a little dog, rushing about and distracted by shiny objects, never quite sure how it got to where it currently is, but no matter because there will always be more shiny objects and - look, shiny!

The analogy is more apt when put in the context of how much time my brain apparently devotes to thinking about things that (in the context of the analogy) are like a dog wading nose-deep in crotches.

That out of the way, I can hop a trip back to my particular train of thought and share my thoughts, for those of you anxiously awaiting something about science projects, battle royales, and not mind/dog/crotch analogies:

I was sitting on the train (I can usually procure a seat after the Roosevelt stop) and became aware of the three boys across from me who were talking about South Park. I wasn't paying attention to their conversation, mostly because I had my iPod on, but I couldn't help but gawk at the blast-from-the-past on the seat next to them. It was one of those cardboard science project things. You know, those obnoxiously-large cardboard stand-up deals that folds out to allow papers and "data" to be strewn about it as it borders some display and stands on a table in a gymnasium and is subject to the ridicule of every passing human being - whether you like it or not. Rage built inside of me, a nostalgic rage (if such a thing can exist) brought about by year after year of mindless science fairs.

That's when a thought entered my head: "Who MAKES these things, anyway?" Not the projects, because the answer is an obvious "fifth-graders" or something, but the actual cardboard things. I expect there are factories churning out these bastards, day in, day out. Working with shipping logistics as an analyst, I wondered for a brief moment if they experience seasonality, like a "science fair season" when revenue skyrockets as so many childhoods fall into the abyss of science fair depression. The moment was fleeting, and I was back to thinking about the factories.

There really can't be that many of them, right? Let's say that with the various companies that make them (since there are multiple varieties, as any fifth-grader could tell you) - there's maybe 50 that deal specifically with these sizes and styles of boards. That's one per state in America.

So here's my question:

Who would win in a fight to the death: all of the factory workers in each factory or all of the fifth-graders in that state?

I chose fifth-graders for this scenario because I think it makes it a fair fight. While practically every child from 2nd grade through high school is probably subjected to science fairs, I think that fifth grade is when you're old enough to be expected to know enough about the scientific method to make an actual experiment - but still young enough to be forced to do one and yammered at about not having your parents do it for you. Plus, fifth grade seems like the nice balance between being old enough to fight to the death, but young enough to not know how to play dirty. Which gives the factory workers the advantage. They're probably outnumbered at a 100-to-1 ratio, which raises the question of whether or not each worker could take out 100 children each.

The maelstrom would be fantastic.

My money is riding on the children. They would be hungrier for it, to be honest. With no boards, there could be no science fairs. The workers must perish. Or, I suppose, stop working at the factories. If they all quit, the boards couldn't be made, and it's likeliest that a worker who hears that a mob of bloodthirsty children will kill all the workers would just quit and find a new job that won't result in death-by-anklebiting. Though if the workers all banded together and created traps and schematics and fought dirty - they would certainly stand a chance. There's something to be said for power in numbers, but even numbers would probably succumb to a well-executed rapid-fire nailgun situation.

It wouldn't take long for the children to locate tools and for the smart/crafty ones to operate them and increase their killing potential. Which is why my money still rides on the army of fifth-graders.

I suppose that in the end, mass murder of adult workers would probably be more devastating to the average childhood than any science project. You could call it a moot point. I prefer to think of it as an experiment with no control and no repeatable results. A science experiment, if you will.

Now if only I had some kind of cardboard device with which I could display my findings...

Party-stopper question: Who would win in a fight to the death - All of the cardboard project-stand factory workers or all of the science-project-hating fifth-graders? Read more!