WhyTheHeck

People should be allowed to post Ghostbusters-type stickers (walking fingers with clash through them) to prohibit yellow pages companies from leaving their books on your doorstep.

This Posting sumamrizes the Best of the Ideas from the only website paying $1-million for Yours

Bottled water has become a fact of life, but the evironmental cost is high. From the materials used to manufacture the bottles to the consumption of gas in the trucks used to ship it to stores, bottled water is an environmental disaster.
But there is a simple solution. Instead of selling bottled water, stores and restaurants [...]

All that is needed is an Executive Order: “Businesses which round down cash transactions to the nearest nickel may refuse to handle pennies.”

It does not appear that allowing businesses which “round down” cash purchases to refuse to accept pennies even requires an Act of Congress.  It is part of what the Treasury Department is authorized to do under existing legislation.  Further there is no negative budget implication so there is no need for a review by the [...]

Pennies are a complete waste, a tax on consumers and retailers which raises nothing for the government. Yet the zinc lobby always defeats legislation to eliminate them. This post proposes a simple win-win change to current law which even the zinc lobby could not defeat: Allowing businesses which agree to “round down” to refuse to handle pennies. We are also proposing civil disobedience to get there. The civil disobedience would take the form of businesses doing exactly that until the law is changed.

Why don’t hotels have no-frills “green rooms” ? Here’s how it would work. First, instead of those little disposable bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body lotion (who the hell even uses the body lotion?), they’d have a dispenser. Second, if you want changes of sheets and towels you’d pay extra. In fact, maid serivce [...]

Like Norman Bates’ mother, your gas and electric meters are never seen outside the basement. But this does not have to be the case. (About metering, that is.) Think Outside Of the Box for a minute. What if every day an email appeared on your computer [...]

THE GREEN DIVIDEND:  HOW TO END OUR FOSSIL FUEL ADDICTION WITHOUT PAIN
 
No one talks seriously about reducing our dependence on carbon-based fuels by taxing them, which would be the obvious way to reduce consumption.  The conventional wisdom is that such a tax would be expensive and unpopular, politically dead on arrival. And if the tax [...]

 
In energy policy, ThinkOOB always starts with two assumptions:
 
(1)   People use too much gasoline because it is priced far lower than it should be.  Even if one does not accept the hypothesis of global warming as a basis for believing that gasoline is underpriced, one cannot dispute the fact that half of our defense budget [...]