POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Don’t be asinine

The above was a favorite saying of my granddaddy, a way of saying "Don't be a dumbass" without getting my grandma to yell at him.

This reaction comes from the following two items: various states passing texting-while-driving bans, and a study of how handheld-phone-use-while-driving bans did bupkis for crash rates.

Mercy me, just telling people not to be idiots didn't work. I wonder why.

I am tired of the biglonglist of stuff that if you were not an idiot, you'd know not to do it. These laws don't stop dumbasses [might change their specific acts of dumbassery, but unlikely], and you don't really need all these extra laws to punish those who endanger the public -- we already have laws against reckless driving, for instance.

If we must enumerate every single dumbass thing not to do while driving, we'll end up with don't-browse-for-porn-on-your-iPad-while-driving law. Do we need to explicitly tell people this? Isn't it implicitly illicit already?

I ran into this checklist of idiocy problem when I was staff at Mathcamp. Before the campers arrived, we needed to figure out the rules, but given these are very clever teens, and likely to outwit any too-specific rule we set, we came up with the Rules of Mathcamp:

0. Be excellent to one another.
1. Don't do stupid stuff.
2. No fire.
3. Don't divide by zero, except under staff supervision.

Now, being teens, they invariably did stupid stuff [and weren't excellent to each other]. But when we told them to knock it off, and pointed to the rules, generally the presence of stupidity or the lack of excellence was evident to all. [I never had a problem with the fire rule, and rule 3.... well, okay, I was pretty lax there. I let the results be their own punishment.]

If only we could replace law in general with the above rules.

RELATED: "It's the stupidity that brings people down". Thanks for the advice, Mr. Spitzer.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.