If I wrote a political column worth its salt, I’d use this week’s theme — nightmares — to talk about the upcoming electoral season. After all, the word night-mares could be tweaked to mean “dark horses,” and I’d use that play on words as a jumping off point for a post about the candidates who might do surprisingly well at the polls. If that interests you, may I suggest fivethirtyeight.com? But on to the column that I wrote …
Someone who I presume is much smarter than I am wrote that “the purpose of government from an economic perspective is to provide a legal framework that allows individuals to transact through markets.”
Being the narcissist that I am, I interpret that to mean that “the purpose of government is to encourage me to buy a flat-screen high-definition television set.”
And, in that sense, my recent foray into consumer culture was a– shit, what do you call it? It’s the opposite of a double-rainbow … That’s right, a double-nightmare.
Let’s make short work of the first part of the nightmare, shall we? That is, having a television in the first place, which is upsetting in its own right.
I hate having to admit that fact, because it makes me seem like such an insufferable poindexter. For what it’s worth, I don’t feel any sense of superiority in saying that I had a great year after my ex-girlfriend moved out with our television set. That’s because my problem was not that I disliked watching television; it’s that I like it TOO much. Without the television, I actually, you know, did stuff. Fun stuff.
You know that study where they put the rat in a cage with one lever to press for junk food and another button to press for nutritious food? Let’s just say it doesn’t end well for the rat. And I was that rat. (Funny how times change — when I was a kid, I had always heard about the study where rats chose cocaine over food. Turns out cocaine isn’t quite as harmful as junk food.)
After a year of healthful activity, I decided to begin pressing the “television” lever and started my search by typing “flat screen television” into Google.
Big mistake.
That’s like walking up to the wall of hot sauce at a Mexican restaurant and being told to choose a single bottle of hot sauce that will fulfill all of your hot sauce needs for the next ten years, as well as anyone else that comes over to your house for a meal. And, oh yeah, it costs $1,000 and they might come out with multi-dimensional hot sauce technology in the next year or so, at which point you’ll inevitably come to regret your choice. The analogy starts to break down at this point, but you get the point: It’s an important — not to mention expensive — decision, and there’s not much in the way of guidance for an neophyte who is trying to decide between getting “Ass Blaster” or “Hemmrhoid Helper.”
Actually, with names like Ass Blaster and Hemmrhoid Helper, it might be easier to remember that one of the options creates a violent, searing ass pain while the other one causes a burning yet somehow ultimately soothing ass pain.
The television sets that I was considering, on the other hand, had names like 40RV525U, KDL40EX400 and LC46D65U. Comparison shopping was unbearable, if not downright impossible.
I’m not going to weigh in on whether government regulation has jumped the shark, but if you were ever wondering what “straight whiskey” is, the government has the answer. Incidentally, after reading all five pages of this, you just might be driven to drink:
Whiskies conforming to the standards prescribed in paragraphs (b)(1)(i) and (ii) of this section, which have been stored in the type of oak containers prescribed, for a period of 2 years or more shall be further designated as ‘‘straight’’; for example, ‘‘straight bourbon whisky’’, ‘‘straight corn whisky’’, and whisky conforming to the standards prescribed in paragraph (b)(1)(i) of this section, except that it was produced from a fermented mash of less than 51 percent of any one type of grain, and stored for a period of 2 years or more in charred new oak containers shall be designated merely as ‘‘straight whisky’’. No other whiskies may be designated ‘‘straight’’. ‘‘Straight whisky’’ includes mixtures of straight whiskies of the same type produced in the same State.
Would it not then be too much to ask for Obama to step in and require that television manufacturers standardize the hieroglyphics that they currently use to identify their television sets?
There are certain number of criteria that anyone in the market for a new flat-screen television set would want to know, such as the screen size, whether the set is an LCD or plasma or the like, the contrast ratio, the aspect ratio, the resolution, and the refresh rate.
So, instead of the current gibberish, why not require that all model numbers consist of six symbols, each of which identifies each of those attributes for any given television set? That way it would be possible, at a glance, to weed out any potential options that shouldn’t be in the running and then make quick work of comparing the value of any that remained.
It’s not an idle question, as no less than our national economy is at stake.
After all, I spent weeks of making spreadsheets that looked like the U.S. military’s Afghan strategy flow chart, and in the end I simply gave up and decided that the least heart-rending option was to simply move back in with my ex-girlfriend — and her ten-year-old television set.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
