Agreed. The use of utensils is what separates us from the animals.
Stupid politicians pass stupid laws.
One thing not in short supply in this world is stupid politicians.
The ones I know for sure are Spain, Costa Rica and France, but from conversations during projects there seem to be similar mechanisms in other Western European and Latin American countries. The legal systems of most of Latin America are direct inheritance from the Spanish one, including this constant-review mechanism. I guess there will be similar ones in French colonies whose system is based on France’s.
Note that this doesn’t mean we never get dumb laws, laws that look dumb when taken out of context or laws that made sense when written but none some years later: all it means is that there is a built-in mechanism to try and keep things “matching up”. It also conditions the way legal research is done: backwards in time and bottom-up works best.
For years, it was illegal where I lived to wear unshined shoes to work on Mondays (fun fact: military dress and appearance regulations fall under Title 10 of the US Code)
When utensils are outlawed, only outlaws will have utensils.
The Manila one isn’t insane on paper either - it’s an air pollution control measure meant to encourage car pooling and use of public transportation.
In practice I suspect it doesn’t work any better than the same scheme does in Mexico City (where people just buy cheap clunkers with plates ending with different numbers for use on the days they’re forbidden to drive their “real” car, which ironically enough actually increases pollution), but that’s a different issue.
Thinking about this some more… I wonder also if some of the “stupid laws” passed were known even at the time they were going through to be frivolity.
The student senate at my University successfully voted in the mid-1990s to annex Poland. As I hear it, it was just a matter of being silly (and/or showing what could pass when people aren’t paying attention)
If you were on the community council in Okahumpka, FL, population 251… maybe you all agree to pass a resolution outlawing dragons or requiring all snow file for a license before falling or some such randomness. Might even do it with a “Hey, maybe this’ll get us a mention on Leno.”
Actually, the combination of those flavors sounds disgusting to me. But everyone’s tastes are different.
Parking on alternating sides of the street on alternating days makes sense even if nobody sweeps the streets. Two examples:
In college towns like West Lafayette, IN, where the campus has parking for 1/5 of the students’ cars, everybody within miles of the school gets sick of having no place to park near their houses.
In NYC, where thousands of people own cars they rarely use, local merchants want to have parking available nearby. See Tupper Isn’t Going Out.
I think it does to everyone, until they try it. Sure, some still think it’s disgusting afterwards, but some like it.
I don’t think this is one of those things where you just imagining what it would taste like is sufficient.
One could ask why Marijuana is illegal .
Some say that it was demonised by Hearst back in the 30s because he thought that Hemp fibre would undercut his timber business because it was quicker to grow, and more flexible .
How does restricting parking even more make things better? If you’re worried about people just parking their cars and leaving them, then outlaw overnight parking.
Outlawing overnight parking would also hurt the locals who live on that street.
In the college town, students would prefer to park on Sunday night and not come back til Friday. In NYC, some folks, without the restriction, would leave a car to gather dust for a month, while the customers of a deli have to park a quarter mile away. In both places, long-term parkers should have to pay for long-term storage somewhere.
One wag defined a university as a place with 10,000 students, 40,000 seats in the stadium, and 4,000 parking places.
So, in Delaware, do everyone’s jeans fall down?