New Year Brings New Laws

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Obviously not all of the 40,697 laws are good ones, but all of the ones mentioned in the article sound good to me.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Plenty of people have died in car accidents caused by texting while driving.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Would Winston prefer to live in the Fallout world?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Man Somalia is such a paradise free of tyranny.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Somalia has no official government. It collapsed and the Islamists took over, not this government-free utopia Winston is expecting.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So Winston wants to authorianarinally force everyone to convert to secular humanism and then abolish government. Makes sense.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I doubt you'll find too many "I WANT MY TRANS FATS!" type whiners since as pointed out they don't even affect the taste. It's not at all comparable to drug prohibition or anything like that.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The reason companies were so fond of trans fat is that it's a cheap way to decrease perishability and food could be stored longer. However as the public backlash turns against it it is quickly becoming no longer worth it.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The new tobacco law passed will require larger warnings starting in 2011, covering 50% of the side of the package and in capital letters.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The US has basically the highest tobacco consumption rate in the developed world, I'm not saying the warnings are the only reason for that, but lax policy in general is. I like Sweden, where I think all tobacco advertising is banned, including signs in stores.

I think the best policy overall though would be just to adopt federal cigarette taxes comparable to NYC or Canada.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The trend on smoking is quite obvious. Compare now to two decades ago. It used to be you had to specifically request a non-smoking section in a restaurant, now smokers should be considered lucky if the restaurant even offers a smoking section. Smoking used to be allowed on airplanes. College dorms used to allow smoking, or at least had smoking and non-smoking floors, now standard is to ban all in-dorm smoking (I remember my freshman year hearing that there was a total four smoking floors last year, now there were none.) Some college campuses I've read about have gone so far to ban ALL smoking on campus. Workplaces and offices used to generally allow smoking, now that is basically unheard of. Tobacco has gotten socially unacceptable to the extreme, pot is probably now more acceptable.

Actually at the house I used to live in at the beginning of 2008, my roommates allowed anyone over to smoke pot anywhere at any time. Any smoking a cigarette had to go outside or to the garage.

Side note: The police have been known to patrol my work's parking lot and ticket anyone who steps within 25 feet of the building before extinguishing their cigarette even by an inch. Now of course you have to put out your cigarette before leaving your car, even holding a lit cigarette in a parking lot is subject to a fine.